Hey Arnold! Season 6: Wedding or Not
by Cre8ivelybankrupt87
Summary: Helga begins to worry that Arnold may not share the same level of affection for her that she feels for him... which is probably the case since she keep imagining the perfect wedding for them. Arnold meanwhile is reaching a boiling point over his frustrations with his relationship with Helga, and with his parents whose eccentricities are starting to drive him nuts.
1. Le Nozze di Arnoldo

**Hey, football heads. This particular story has been stewing in my brain for a while now after HAFanForever suggested the initial idea to me months ago. It took me some time because there's two plot lines going on at once that I probably could/should have split into two different stories, but I think I managed to fit them together… thematically… ah, well. We'll see how it goes.**

**Chronologically this takes place somewhere after 'Couples Only' and before 'Miriam Under the Table.' Why does that matter? Well in the progression of this ongoing story, Helga is now fully okay with and even eager to show off Arnold as her boy toy, and it's before her big falling out with her family and subsequent move in at the boarding house.**

**The basic premise was that of Miles and Stella renewing their wedding vows, wanting to make up for lost time which is an idea I love but building an entire story around it took me some time as I like to explore themes and all that crap… thus over-inflating my stories with ideas until I make peoples' eyes roll so far back into their heads they can read their own minds by seeing their brains and… wow, that sentence ran away with itself. You see my dilemma? I tend to overcomplicate things. **

**Still, this one won't be NEARLY as complicated as I ended up making 'The Big Pataki,' which I'm excited about… just a chance to write a nice, simple, eloquent story in the HA! universe about love… love and massive corporate and government conspiracies that run deep into the very framework of the entire city, and threatening to tear the Shortman family apart as they face their past demons and the deep dark secrets they thought they had left behind them in the jungles of San Lorenzo that are at long last revealed!**

**…**

**Kidding. None of that. Enjoy!**

**Oh… I'm trying something I've not attempted before which is depicting a musical number in this opening scene… or rather an opera scene. Not sure how to do that in writing form so… uh… hope some of you have seen Le Nozze di Figaro (Marriage of Figaro). Anyway the tune they're singing to goes something like this www. youtube watch?v=t2yrDWEoCpc**

**This scene in the opera is of the Countess forgiving her husband for his many, many, many, many, many misdeeds… and by that point in the story the actual wedding of Figaro is over (an entire act ago, in fact), but it's not as if 'What's Opera, Arnold?' didn't stray a bit (a lot) from what was really going on in the operas it parodied.**

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Chapter 1: Le Nozze di Arnoldo

Adorned in an elegant eighteenth century wedding dress, Helga titled her head upwards and surveyed her setting. Despite the evening outdoor surroundings she still found herself looking into a blinding light. She squinted and realized she was standing on stage, with a spotlight shining down on her, and the garden surrounding her existed as a set piece. That hardly mattered to her, for standing before her was her one and only football-headed love god. Not long ago, Helga had been shuddering in embarrassment with the mere thought of people knowing about her deep, dark and disturbing affections for Arnold, but now she felt proud enough about their budding relationship that she could just sing about it from the stage with the whole world as her audience.

And so she did.

"Footballheeeeaaad, how I loathe you… how I loathe you, yet love you toooooo."

Arnold knelt before her and took her hand in his.

"My heart holds naught but love for yooooou." Arnold responded, also in song, "It loves you mooooore than you ever could… knew."

Helga raised her eyebrow.

"I had to make it rhyme…" Arnold shrugged, but before either of them could dwell on his artistic liberty taken, the opera chorus joined in.

"Their looooove iiiiiiis strong as their hate… they love and hate each ooooother… or was it just something thaaaat theeeey ate?"

The chorus consisted of their various friends, acquaintances and other people Helga just barely tolerated. Gerald, Stinky, Harold and Sid stood together as groomsmen, opposite the bridesmaids Phoebe, Rhonda, Olga and Lila… Olga and Lila!? Not what Helga had in mind, but oh well.

"Myyyyy looooove!" Helga sang out, just barely in tune.

"Glad you love me more than you hate me right now…" Arnold sang in response.

"Myyy hate!" Helga continued.

"Well, now I'm just plain confused- owwww…" Arnold sang as Helga gripped him forcibly by his shoulders.

The massive audience that seemed to stretch out forever over the horizon all let loose a big group, "Aww…"

Helga turned to the audience and grinned smugly.

"That's right." she said, "We're adorable and you love it, you bunch of loser Arnold/Helga shippers with nothing better to do with your pathetic little lives than-"

"My love?" Arnold asked.

"Don't insult the audience." he said.

"Of course." she sighed, "I never dreamt our wedding would have been so beautifully meta. Meta and so infinitely… infinite."

"From now unto infinity, let the bells herald our wedding… thingy." Arnold again tried in vain to rhyme as he began singing again.

"Their wedding thingy! Sing sing sing singy!" the chorus sang.

"Hey, this is a wedding!" Helga shouted, "Don't we need some kinda officiant or-"

Breathing heavily, none other than Brainy appeared before them dressed in a priest costume. Or maybe he'd actually gotten himself ordained on one of those online churches. Whichever.

"Do you, Helga Geraldine Pataki take Arnold Philip Shortman to be your lawfully wedded-" he tried to begin.

"Uh, doi! I mean... I do." Helga answered, before she could read into whatever deeper meaning her quasi-mystical stalker's appearance could mean.

Arnold attempted to tenderly kiss his bride, but Helga beat him to the punch and pulled him into a crushing embrace, and she didn't so much kiss him as try to swallow his entire face. After nearly suffocating her beloved, she released him with a loud smack of her lips. The audience roared with applause,, the sound and scale matching that of a vast roaring ocean.

"Oh…" she swooned, "Could this be any more perfect…?"

"Wedding thingy! Sing sing singy!" the singing chorus repeated.

"I guess I'd settle for better lyrics…" she sighed, "Seriously, who wrote this thing? Mozart's lame-o cousin?"

The flamboyantly dressed maestro (who looked oddly like Arnold's own cousin Arnie) conducting the pit orchestra down below looked upward at her and scowled.

"Ja… and even ze musicology vorld von't acknowledge I eva existed…" he sighed ruefully, but then after he gave a loud phlegmy snort he returned to conducting the players.

"I hoped this would be perfect enough." Arnold said, "Our wedding taking place in the form of an opera, and all…"

Helga stroked her chin as she pondered.

"Could be better, still…" she said.

"Your parents are finally happy together, and they showed up." Arnold gestured to the chorus where Bob and Miriam stood, both waving at their daughter.

"We made it to your recital, honey!" Miriam said.

"Hey, Olga? Are you winning?" Bob asked, "What's the score? I can't follow all this opera noise…"

"They forgot it's our wedding… but they're here. I'll take it." Helga shrugged, then her eyes wandered over to another wedded couple.

"And your folks are still the picture of happily married perfection." she smirked, "Hi Stella! Hi Miles! Or can I call you mom and dad, now?"

Arnold's parents held one another lovingly and smiled adoringly at their now daughter-in-law.

"Mom and dad?" Big Bob shouted, "Then what are you gonna call us!?"

"Bob and Miriam. Doi." Helga smirked.

"Oh, right." Bob said with a smile.

"Still, how to end an opera end more perfectly than by marrying you… I guess you could… stab Lila?" Helga suggested.

Still smiling guilelessly, Lila waved at Arnold.

"Wrong opera…" Arnold said flatly.

"Ah, well. Can't have everything." Helga shrugged.

"It matters not, my love." Arnold said, "Wish not for everything. You have something better than everything…" He gestured to himself.

"Yep. You're all mine now…" Helga grinned with a loving malevolence and threw herself at her love, and now husband, once more to kiss and do to him whatever else newlyweds did.

"Helga?" Arnold asked.

"Yes, darling?"

"There's something I've been meaning to sing to you-"

"Oh, just say it instead." Helga said. "All this singing is getting annoying."

"All right then," Arnold took a deep breath, "I… lo… I lo… I lo…"

As Arnold struggled to spit it out, meanwhile, outside of her illustrious and expensive looking dreams, Helga sat at her desk with her head resting in her hands. Her mind and soul remained off in la la land, while her body had the misfortune to be in the distinctly non-operatic setting of math class. All the while Mr. Simmons had been so caught up in a particularly complicated equation and wasn't noticing the girl muttering in her sleep.

"Helga?" the concerned mousy voice of her best friend Phoebe asked, to no response.

"Mmm… muh…" Helga mumbled, still asleep. "Nyu… say it… fubawl head…"

"Let's try this again…" Mr. Simmons said, scratching letters and numbers on the board, "If X equals plus or minus the square root of- aw, fudge. Students? I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time making learning fun here… this one might jut be plain old work…"

"Helga…" Phoebe pleaded, "I realize you're probably not getting an adequate amount of sleep at the beeper store, but-"

"Muh… Arnoldo… weddin… thingy… singy singy…"

"SIMMONS!" the explosive voice of Harold violently shook Helga out of her fantasy.

"Thingy!" Helga gasped as she snapped back to reality.

"Helga won't stop talking about her thingy and it's infringing on my right to learn!" Harold shouted.

The class erupted into laughter.

"Yeah, like that's a right you're ever gonna exercise…" Helga yawned, still not entirely aware of what was happening. "Can we dim the lights so I can get back to sleep? Things were just getting good…"

"Helga." Mr. Simmons said warningly, "If you don't learn the quadratic formula now, you might not be able to properly apply it to real life."

"Mr. Simmons?" Phoebe asked, "What kind of real life scenarios could we apply this equation to?"

"Well… um… I mean, apart from trying to teach it to a class of students…" Mr. Simmons stumbled, "It could be used to… I guess it..."

"Right, right." Helga yawned, "Guess we need to know how to cook quadraticals, out in the real world."

Helga then snapped her head in Arnold's direction and grinned mischievously.

Arnold watched her in half embarrassment and half amusement. Everyone nearby had heard her muttering his name in her sleep, and somehow he only felt mildly embarrassed. The looks he got from his classmates said it all; any time Helga did anything weird nowadays everyone assumed it had something to do with him. Once private, his relationship with Helga had become public knowledge and now the girl was ready, willing and eager to let anyone and everyone know that they were in a committed relationship. Helga had conquered her embarrassment, and now she showed next to no shame. Her affection could be overbearing at times, but even at its worst Arnold found it all flattering, even if every glimpse he got into her feelings for him just seemed to be an ever expanding bottomless abyss.

Of course, Arnold had wanted to be open about his feelings for her, though now compared to the extremes she was taking things he felt relatively secretive. This confused him far more than the math lesson unfolding in front of them now. Yet despite his limited experience with girls, even Arnold knew that the level of commitment Helga and he shared was rare, if not unnaturally strange for a pair of twelve year olds. Regardless, now that it was Friday he and Helga had plans for the evening and he hoped she was just as ready for a fun time as he felt.

Later, at the end of the school day, Arnold and Helga strode down the hallway hand in hand, both off in their own little world and oblivious to the looks they were getting from their fellow students.

"… and then I heard they got caught in the janitor closet, just sucking face like there was no tomorrow…" the voice of Rhonda at last snapped them back to reality. "I mean, I'd expect her to stoop so low, but I'd have thought he'd have more class and dignity than that…"

Indeed, the school gossip queen was standing before a group of girls, doing exactly what anyone would expect a gossip queen to do.

"Rhonda?" Arnold asked, slightly perturbed.

"Oh, Arnold! Helga!" Rhonda waved at them, "What a coincidence, I was just gossiping about you. Did you hear what's going around about you lovebirds?"

Arnold narrowed his eyes at Rhonda. The girl was incredibly straightforward and unapologetic about her ways, he had to give her that. It still didn't make her any less annoying.

"Don't you think we would already know what happens in our own lives?" Arnold asked.

"Oh, so the janitor closet story is true?" Rhonda asked, "Thanks for confirming… and here I couldn't even remember if I'd made that one up or not. Thanks Arnold. The school depends on me for accurate gossip, I wouldn't want to be spreading anything unfounded. So tell me, is it true you two have some big fancy date planned for tonight-"

The sudden tight clench of Helga's hand on the scruff of Rhonda's shirt stopped her chattering cold. The two girls just stared at one another for a moment as everyone else present watched in silent terror. Helga glanced over at Arnold, and then her mouth curled into a half smile and she released Rhonda.

"Yep." Helga affirmed, "Jealous?"

"Jealous? Me? As if I have a single jealous bone in my body." Rhonda turned her nose upward, sounding disgusted by the mere notion. Then she turned to Arnold and asked, "Chez Pierre ? Chez Paris? Or something even fancier?"

"Um…" Arnold scratched the back of his neck, "Slaussen's…"

"Yes…" Helga sighed, beginning to talk in her flowery way, "And though the setting of our rendezvous may be cheap, we are both rich in love for one another… so rich in love I daresay we make you look impoverished in love, Rhondaloid…"

"Ugh…" Rhonda retched, "Still, better than actual impoverishment…"

"Agree to disagree," Helga shook her head and grabbed Arnold's hand, "C'mon Football Head."

With Helga leading Arnold away, the couple walked off and out of sight as Rhonda watched them disappear.

"Ugh, they really are the most obnoxiously adorable pair…" she sighed. "Still, Helga could stand to be just a little more modest about it…"

As Arnold and Helga walked down the front steps of the school together, Helga's mind again wandered back to yet another wedding fantasy. Hand in hand with her beloved, she descended the stairs, heading for the limo that would carry them off to a new life together. Then the honking of the school rudely rocked her out of her rapture and back to Hillwood.

As the bus doors opened, off stepped two familiar adults.

"Mom? Dad?" Arnold asked.

"Hey, Arnold!" Miles and Stella greeted their son warmly, yet with that eerie glassy eyed look they hadn't quite shaken since their return from the jungle.

"What were you doing on the school bus?" Arnold asked, "I didn't know adults were allowed…"

"They're adults?" the bus driver asked, "I thought they were just really tall fifth graders…"

Helga laughed.

"Easy mistake to make…"

"It's a nice day." Stella noted, "Why don't we all just walk home? Helga? You're always welcome, too."

"Um, alright." Arnold said, as he and Helga released each others' hands.

"Come on, Arnold!" Miles goaded, "I'll race you!"

Miles took off running down the sidewalk ahead of them, giggling boyishly all the while, and he never noticed that none of the others were running after him. When he disappeared from sight Arnold sighed.

"He's over stimulated again." Helga said, "Better put him straight to bed when you get home, Stella."

"Nonsense, we've got the whole evening ahead of us. It's a Friday night at the boarding house! There's too much fun to be had for an early bedtime." Stella grinned.

"Well, Helga and I were gonna go out to Slaussen's tonight and-"

"Great! We'll come with you!" Stella said.

"Um… you know…" Arnold stumbled, "On a-"

"A date, I know." Stella nodded, "I went on one of those once… I think… yeah, Miles and I fell off a cliff into a river and-"

"We… don't really need to be… you know? Chaperoned?" Arnold said.

"No, no, it'll be more like a double date!" Stella said.

Helga's eyes went wide.

"Oh no…" she said softly, "No way is _our_ date turning into a 'double date' with your parents…"

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**And you all know how that joke ends at the beginning of the next chapter… **

**I was gonna do an entire story of 'The Marriage of Arnoldo,' but decided to just condense it into the opening of this story. Some things work on screen and not so much on the page… musical parodies being at the top of that list. **


	2. Double Date of Doom

_**Reviewer responses:**_

_**Kryten: Thank you! It's a tricky thing to write without the added sound of music itself.**_

_**The J.A.M. a.k.a. Numbuh i: Slugging Brainy is one thing. Slugging Rhonda will get you sued, and even a ticking emotional time bomb like Helga knows this. :P**_

_**Anonyomous Latino: Ahhh, good. I did want it to feel slightly ambiguous at first. Dreams always seem real even when nothing going on makes sense. **_

_**Yeah, this story follows her big declaration to the school that she loves Arnold in 'Couples Only' where she rashly decides to just get it all out in the open so she can stop feeling afraid of the secret getting out. **_

_**Heh, this is less about the cracks in Miles and Stella's relationship and more about... well, yes it is about that but in the sense that their relationship is just so perfect that... well, I'll just say they might not know how to handle anything less than perfect when it finally comes along...**_

**HAFanForever: Hehe, I mean... I thought I made it weird enough from the start that it was obviously a dream but I'm glad I seem to have initially fooled a few people. **

**Rhonda is... somehow self aware and hypocritical about her gossiping all at once. At least when I write her... I contain multitudes, and it bleeds into whatever character I'm writing for. XD**

**No. No it will not go well.**

**After your initial suggestion, I've had this story stewing in my mind for a while, and it was surprisingly complicated to fit the pieces together... I just tend to overcomplicate everything I write. I hope the results are good.**

_**A/N: Okay, so in writing this, I just realized Arnold and Helga dine and dashed in Arnold's Valentine! I guess Arnold didn't eat anything and Helga threw up her meal so… that exempted them from paying? Meh. Minor details.**_

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Chapter 2: Double Date of Doom

"I can't believe our date turned into- actually, scratch that." Helga sighed, before she could finish her usual line, "Nothing these two clowns do surprises me anymore."

She inclined her head at Arnold's parents one by one, while Arnold himself just sat silently brooding, with a look that suggested he just wanted to vanish in a puff of smoke. Crammed into a booth together at Slaussen's diner, he sat uncomfortably close to his mom while hid dad sat with Helga on the other side.

For a lad of twelve from not the most affluent family in town, taking his girlfriend out to restaurants in the class of Chez Pierre or Chez Paris all the time wasn't in the cards. He'd been saving up his allowance money for that eventual date, but with he level of attention Helga required nowadays he had to take her out somewhere, and to him Slaussen's felt like an appropriately accessible dining destination for a tween couple on a budget. He figured Helga felt similarly, but with his parents crashing their date the girl didn't look to be in the best of spirits. Arnold felt overwhelmingly anxious with the world of his parents and world of Helga colliding like this, with him caught in the middle. Not that they had anything against each other of course. Arnold had heard from Gerald that Phoebe's and his parents were a little cautious about them dating at such a young age, but given what exactly Helga had done for his own parents, the two of them had accepted her into the Shortman fold as if the two kids were married or something.

Marriage. At his age the very idea felt strange to Arnold. Sure, he'd toyed with the idea in his younger years out of curiosity, back when he used to imagine marrying some of his earlier crushes, but that all felt like some kind of far off fantasy and nothing to do with his actual reality, and therefore something he didn't have to stress about. He looked up at his parents who were now gazing lovingly into one another's eyes, lost in momentary bliss without a crare in the world between them. Despite their general weirdness, he couldn't deny the two of them were perfect for one another. Then Arnold looked at Helga who's eyes might as well have been shooting knives across the table into his own. Put off by her glare, Arnold looked back to his parents and sighed.

With a bit of somber reflection, Arnold's recalled his fondest wish since before he could remember was to see his long lost parents again, or to at least get closure on their fate. Now his only wish was to get at least an hour or so to himself once in a while without them smothering him with love and affection, or rather their somewhat alien versions of said feelings.

"These two '_clowns'_ are my parents, Helga…" Arnold said at last, and then glanced at both of his parents who were suddenly so preoccupied with the menu that they didn't appear to notice Helga or his own commentary.

"Ah, they're still a step up from the parents I've got waiting for me at home tonight. Or more specifically _not _waiting for me. Y'know." Helga snickered, "Cuz they don't wuv me wike yours wuv you."

"Well I'm glad you see humor in your home life…" Arnold said to Helga.

"Only way to survive it." she said with a frown.

Helga's running sardonic commentary didn't help ease Arnold's feelings on the subject of his parents. He cared deeply for her too, of course, but her lightning fast mood swings between bitter and angry to loving and affectionate, or even her more jovial side laced with her signature acidic sense of humor were all jarring and confusing. Every crush he'd had in the past left him thinking girls were complicated, and somehow he'd ended up dating the most complicated one he'd ever known. Arnold had always tried to ignore her back when she used to relentlessly bully him, and in some ways even now that Helga had shown him her true colors, her crazed behavior still had roughly the same affect on him that it always had. He had to keep reminding himself of just how awful Helga's home life had become, which didn't entirely excuse her attitude but it at least he understood it.

For most of his childhood he mostly had to deal with his grandparents and their eccentricities, which he could handle and even came to love over time, as they balanced out those traits with warmth and and nurturing in unique ways. Now Arnold had to deal with the combined craziness of his grandparents, his actual parents, and Helga on a daily basis which had him close to snapping. And snapping was something Arnold was not accustomed to.

"This is fun." Stella said suddenly, with a slightly glazed over look in her eyes.

"Yeah, we should do this more often," Miles agreed.

Arnold smiled briefly, but then looked back at Helga who's glower brought him back to reality. He looked at his parents and reflected on his relationship with them. For most of his life they had existed as mythical, almost godlike entities to him; swashbuckling heroes braving all manner of fantastical adventures in the stories his grandpa told him. Even after hearing the truth about their work as humanitarian workers, Arnold still romanticized their story in his mind. Meeting them in the flesh had been the most euphoric moment of his life, but once the initial dreamlike feeling of their reunion started to wear off over time it had become clear to him that their ten year bout with the sleeping sickness had done a number on them.

Arnold loved them and accepted them of course, that was the kind of person he was, but he was still starting to feel the limits of his preteen patience, especially when they pulled stunts like this.

He hadn't been able to talk his parents out of their idea of a 'double date,' which really amounted to them chaperoning him. Most frustratingly of all, he felt he couldn't even get angry with either of them, as neither Miles nor Stella even seemed aware of just how suffocating they had become in recent months. Like a pair of puppies they were lovable, annoying, needy, and impossible to be mad at for their eagerness to please. And ironically Arnold's inability to be truly angry with them… angered him.

Arnold's feeling of anger towards his parents felt wrong to him, and so he buried it deep down.

"Let's see… chicken fingers… grilled cheese… " Stella continually poured over a menu, and one not designed for her age group.

"Um, mom? That's the kids menu." Arnold pointed out.

"Yes?" Stella answered obliviously.

"Like the…" Arnold coughed into his hand, "… little kids menu."

"Oh, I know. I know." Stella said, "I'm just looking for something I know I can actually get you to eat. You can be such a fussy eater, you know… and a really messy one too. I'm just not sure if you can chew any of this…"

Arnold's eyes rolled back so far he worried he might see his own brain. Owing to the ten year gap in both his parents' memories, they often lapsed back to the time when Arnold was still just a baby. As routine as it had become, it never failed to annoy him at varying levels, and he had to keep reminding himself it wasn't their fault. His annoyance spiked whenever Helga witnessed them babying him, and she responded reflexively in the only way she knew how to; teasing him relentlessly. Helga, despite looking mostly her usual dour, irritable self, couldn't restrain herself from snickering mockingly at her boyfriend's expense. Arnold watched as his girlfriend surprsessed an enormous laugh, producing snorting noises instead.

"Have you got a cold, Helga?" Miles asked, apparently mistaking her snickering for sniffling. He grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket, and as he tried to unceremoniously shove it in her face he knocked over his glass of water and spilled it on both of them.

"Oops…" he uttered in embarrassment.

"Gah!" Helga shrieked, "Cold! Cold!"

"Ah, I thought you had a cold, here let me try again-"

"No I mean the ice water you just spilled all over me is cold!" Helga growled.

"Oh, don't worry, water doesn't stain." Stella said with a smile, "It dries and that's that… unless… have they changed water in the last ten years? Does it stain now? Do all those electrolytes they put in there leave a- no... with my doctorate you'd think I'd remember that... wow..."

Helga shot a look at Arnold that just screamed, 'Seriously?' Arnold stood up and grabbed a few napkins.

"Here, let me dry you off." he offered, and started dabbing her jumper with a napkin.

Helga cooled down quickly and smiled contentedly. Her eyes glazed over and she looked to be on cloud nine for a moment, but then she abruptly smacked herself across the cheek and grabbed the napkin from Arnold.

"Yeah, yeah, I got it." she said, dabbing herself off.

"But-"

"Ah, just sit down and save the chivalry for some dummy in distress." Helga insisted. "Just help your mom with he kiddy menu."

Stella nodded and said, "I bet we can just ask them to cut this up into little tiny pieces…. or just mash it or-"

"I'm twelve, mom… I'm not a baby." Arnold groaned at his mother, holding up an adult menu, "Look, I've got this. I know what I-"

"Wait, twelve!?" Miles gasped in shock. He then abruptly jumped up and dashed over toward the waitstaff.

"What's his deal now?" Helga asked as she continually tried to dry herself off with little success.

"I don't know…" Arnold sighed, "Maybe he forgot thirteen is the number people think is supposed to be unlucky."

"What, and he thinks it's twelve?" Helga nodded, "I guess that fits. You know, since he's one card short of a full deck or- that's not how that expression goes, is it?"

"I don't know…" Arnold said in annoyance, "Mom? I'm just gonna order a cheeseburger-"

"Yeah, c'mon, Stella," Helga urged, "Short man's a big boy now, he can order for himself. Right, football h- um, Arnold?"

She caught herself. Arnold had more or less accepted her age old insult as an endearing pet name by now, but given that he got his distinctive head shape from his mother's side of the family, even Helga knew to be just a little cautious about using the name 'football head' around Stella.

"Helga, I'm sorry this isn't going like we planned… but I'll make it up to you." Arnold insisted, "Right now why don't we just have a nice family dinner?"

"Family dinner, huh? Oh sure, this may be a lousy date, and an awkward family dinner, but it's still grade A entertainment." Helga said with a wry smile. "I'm just gonna order some popcorn and enjoy the show, here."

Arnold groaned yet again, now barely able to contain his frustration, and yet as always he still somehow found a way to try to make the best of a bad situation. He looked at Helga, and curiously he found a smile forming on his face. He understood and even shared her frustration, and so despite her caustic quips he had to sympathize with her. This was supposed to be their date night and his parents had taken that away… by trying to be loving and caring in their own weird way. Of course, Helga similarly had her own weird way of caring. Her negative qualities were definitely more noticeable most of the time, sine that was the picture she intentionally projected to the world as a defense mechanism, but Arnold could still see through the guise and recognized her as a sensitive soul with a hear the size of Mount Rushmore… even if she stubbornly refused to let it show. No, he could never forget what she had done for him. Arnold realized finding his parents never would have happened without everything she had done for him, so in his and seemingly his parents' minds that gave her _some_ license to make fun of them... and him too, naturally.

_Just keep reminding yourself that her heart is purer than she knows…_ _or will admit…_

Arnold thought to himself, slightly forcibly. He looked at Helga, and as he gazed at her he suddenly felt warm inside. Despite her unkempt appearance, she looked radiant, aided by the setting sun breaking through the windows and shining on her like some divine spotlight. The sunlight just forced her to squint and glower even harder than usual, and still to Arnold she looked lovely, like some glistening, angsty, squinty eyed, glowering portrait of horrible perfection.

Thankfully Arnold had just enough digression not to speak his internal monologue aloud. That description of Helga sounded alright to him in his own mind, but he knew improvised poetic talk was best left to her. He'd taken his grandpa's blunt criticism to heart and knew he was many things, but not a poet.

With his mother still fretting over the kids menu, and his father off whispering something to the waitstaff, Arnold dared a broad smile in Helga's direction. She looked back at him in silence and just raised her eyebrow. The two of them managed to communicate silently, and found themselves in their own little world for a moment. As he smiled at Helga, to his surprise she actually started to smile back, just a little. Then he felt something from under the table pressing against his foot. Helga flashed her eyebrow mischievously as she touched her foot to his, and Arnold tried to reciprocate. Then suddenly their little game of footsie ended with Helga stomping hard on his foot.

"Ow…" Arnold muttered quietly, though it really hadn't hurt him.

"Sorry… I'm new at that…" Helga laughed, and she shot him a little wink. "I'll be gentle next time."

Arnold glanced at his mother who hadn't noticed any of this. She was pouring over the menu fanatically, as if terrified of making the wrong decision on what to order for him.

"Mom?" Arnold asked her quietly, "Seriously, you don't have to-"

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" the loud voices of Miles and the entire waitstaff suddenly rocked Arnold, Helga and Stella out of what they were doing.

Miles starting conducting everyone present as the waitstaff, holding a large cake decorated with twelve candles, lowered it to Arnold's level and started to sing.

_Happy birthday to you!_

Helga banged her fists on the table in rhythm, rather than singing.

_Happy birthday to you! _

_Happy birthday dear…_

The singing waitstaff trailed off and then looked to Miles for help.

"Oh." Miles grinned sheepishly, "Forgot to uh, give them your name… Arnold. It's Arnold."

_Arnold… Happy birthday to youuuuuuuuu."_

Silence fell over the room as all eyes fixed upon the confused birthday boy in question.

"Um, thanks… " Arnold said, "But… my birthday was back in October."

"What!?" his parents gasped in unison, "We missed it!?"

The overwhelming sound of guilt in their voices stung Arnold, even if it was unfounded.

"No! No… we had a party. It was great!" Arnold said, "You were both there… you planned the whole thing…"

"Oh…" Stella said, "Yeah… we did."

"That's right…" Miles nodded, "I tripped and fell into the cake… well, hey! We missed nine of your birthdays so… I figure we can just make up for that with one surprise party at a time!"

Arnold reflexively just laughed. The very notion of that idea filled him with such a joy he just couldn't restrain. Moments like this just reminded him that every weird thing his parents did was out of love.

"May the candles on your cake burn like cities in your wake." Helga sang, in a very morbid tone, "Happy birthday. Oh, Happy birthday… one day closer to death…"

The waitstaff all stared in silence at Helga and then one by one they slowly backed away and resumed their duties.

"Helga room-clearer Pataki." Helga said proudly as she cracked her knuckles, "You're welcome, Arnoldo."

Arnold and his parents looked at her and blinked in silence.

"Now, let's just have this birthday cake for dinner and call it a night…" Helga said as she grabbed her fork, "Thanks for the date, my sweet..."

As Helga started bitterly shoveling bites of cake into her mouth, Arnold realized he'd have to make this disaster of a date up to her. With his helicopter parents hovering however, he just couldn't fathom how.

* * *

_**A/N: I'm in the process of moving right now so I'm gonna be updating even slower than usual. Thanks to everyone for sticking around and reading! Please do favorite and review! Feedback always helps the creative process and man have I ben struggling with that lately...**_

_**Next chapter: Arnold walks Helga home... will things get better or worse? (If you've read anything of mine before, you know the answer...)**_


	3. Fantasy Bites

**Reviewer Responses:**

**The JAM aka Numbuh i: Dodged... almost... well here comes a full spray of bullets...**

**Anonymous Latino: Yep. That is all completely accurate. And here it all comes...**

* * *

Chapter 3: Fantasy Bites

After the dog and pony show that was their dinner date, Arnold managed to talk his parents into letting him Walk Helga home without their help. Now they strode down the darkened city streets together, hand in hand. Helga's disappointment with the rest of their date didn't stop her from holding hands, no she was going to salvage whatever was left of their evening together.

"Sorry, Helga…" Arnold sighed, still sounding horribly embarrassed.

Helga had long chided Arnold for his blind optimism, and it must have been infectious because she found her heart pounding with unfettered excitement just to be in Arnold's company in spite of his parents crashing their date. Arnold was an idealist, she was a romantic, combine the two and the result is a romanic idealist and that feeling came over Helga so strongly now that she didn't even see darkened city streets and dim lights around her. As her mind wandered off and got lost, the cement pavement transformed into cobblestone, the cars, buses taxis and buses into horse drawn carriages, and even her own twenty first century dress became a flowing medieval dress, giving her the look and feel of a princess… nay a queen. Her hair, normally formed into static pigtails sticking out of her head now flowed elegantly down in waves of gold. She turned to Arnold, who looked as if he had just escaped from the cover of a similar medieval romance novel. The short, thin, twelve year old boy was now a tall, chiseled, muscular, knightly specimen of a man, with his golden hair now flowing downward and blowing in the wind. He hadn't lost that ridiculous little blue hat of his, naturally. It still rested upon his football head like some constant and stubborn symbol of his youth that he couldn't part with, but somehow it completed his look so she forgave it.

Arnold stretched forth his hand, which she observed connected to his ripped muscular arm, and he treated her with a loving gaze that melted her insides.

"Helga, my love?" he asked.

"Yes, darling?" Helga swooned as she drank him in with her eyes, gulping and not sipping.

"Come, let us brave the dangers of this vast world together, my lady." he gestured to the horizon, a vast and picturesque mountainous landscape.

"Your lady?" she asked.

"Forgive me... my princess!"

Helga raised her eyebrow and cocked a half grin.

"Getting closer…" she said.

"My queen!" Arnold fell to his knees and took her hand in his, and kissing it gently as one so gallant as him was wont to do.

"That works." she nodded.

Helga's eyes met her beloved's, and those two green emeralds that occupied his face shimmered, creating some crazy disco light effect as little specks of light danced across her face. The sparkle in his eyes and in her own illuminated the entire darkened world around them, even blinding all unfortunates around them and sending horse drawn carriages crashing into one another. How beautifully obnoxious their love was that it disrupted the world around them so, just like Helga had always dreamt it would.

"But lo, behold! There on the horizon!" Arnold cried.

"Yes… the horizon of the eternal green sea I see in your two eyes-"

"No, the literal horizon!" Arnold corrected, "Look!"

Helga turned dramatically and gasped when she beheld a terrible nightmarish sight galloping towards them. Under the crimson sunset in the distance, an enormous black stallion, carrying on its back a knight in dark ebony armor, with a dark red cape flowing behind him in the wind, came rushing towards them. The knight's face hid behind his helmet, but it did not hide the malice on his face. In his hand he held aloft a flowing banner displaying his emblem, a bight crimson fish… or more specifically a red herring. Arnold boldly stood his ground and shielded Helga from the oncoming interloper.

"Stay back, thou misbegotten fiend!" Arnold bellowed heroically.

"Oh, Arnold your prose has become so very, very… adequate… for a sixth grader." Helga swooned.

The horse screeched to a halt just feet away from the couple, and now its master stared down at them.

"I have come seeking this fair one's hand." he said in a deep metallic voice, "Stand in my way, and you shall fall. And you shall fall even harder than my heart has for this treasure that stands before me."

"Well, I'm flattered of course…" Helga chortled, but then glared at the black knight, "But I'm spoken for, Sir Goofus of Gallant."

Arnold stood all and bellowed, "And I will defend her from all manner of unwanted saucy advances from-"

"Not her," the knight shook his head, "You."

He pointed at Arnold.

"Huh?" Arnold and Helga gasped together.

The knight withdrew his helmet, and revealed 'his' to be the wrong descriptive word.

"Rhonda!?" Helga and Arnold gasped.

"That's right…" Rhonda laughed dementedly as she stared at them with burning eyes, "Only someone like my humble self, the richest most popular and attractive person this side of the earth is deserving of this diamond in the rough…"

"Diamond?" Helga spat, "Have you seen his eyes? He's more of an emerald in the rough… a football-shaped emerald in the-"

"Silence, hideous goblin spawn!" Rhonda drew her sword and pointed it in Helga's direction, "Sir Arnold, I shall liberate you from this monster's clutches! And we shall ride forth together into-"

"I'll show ya goblin spawn, princess prissy pants!" Helga shouted back.

Rhonda couldn't even manage a retort before Helga sprang up into the air, tackled her off the horse and wrestled her to the ground, throwing punches in her direction. Arnold turned his head away in fear as Rhonda cried out in terror, accompanied by rather cartoonish sounding punching sounds, until her screams turned into soft groans of defeat.

Helga walked out from behind Rhonda's horse where she had subdued its master. Arnold rushed to her and again fell to his knees.

"My queen…"

"Okay, on second thought, don't call me that…" Helga shuddered, "Kinda weird."

Suddenly from out of the sky, a gigantic winged dragon dive-bombed down towards the scene and landed at Helga's side. Rather than reacting in terror, Helga reached out and pet the creature's muzzle. The dragon looked uncannily like her own pet monitor lizard, only with a few upgrades.

"Forgive me…" the giant winged reptile panted, "I'm late… I sensed you needed my protection but I… oh, I see you uh, took care of things?"

"Nothing Old Betsy couldn't handle." Helga said nonchalantly, holding up her fist in triumph, "Take the night off, Arnoldo's safe under my care."

"Alright then." her pet dragon nodded, as it took flight once again, causing hurricane force winds to blow away everyone and everything surrounding Arnold and Helga. The two of them were now alone in a blank, darkened, empty void.

Arnold blinked in mild astonishment, but then turned his attention back to Helga.

"My love, you saved me from the worst fate imaginable! Being with a girl who wasn't you!"

"Wouldn't be the first time, Sir Bucko." Helga laughed, "And it won't be the last time I'll save your sorry butt…"

"Oh that I might be saved by thy blessed hand every day from here to oblivion!" Arnold declared.

"And so you shall be." Helga affirmed, "For not once, but a hundred, nay a thousand, nay infinite times would I- no, that's too much… I'll stick with a hundred. For a hundred times over would I give everything just to hear the words let loose from thy lips, affirming and sealing thy love for Helga G. Pataki…" she swooned, and then looked at him, hoping that speech had been obvious enough for him to get the hint.

Arnold smiled at her and slowly began to speak, "Helga, I… I… I…"

"Yes?" Helga clasped her hands together in excitement, ready to finally hear those three little words she had so desperately longed to hear from him.

"I… I… I'm sorry." Arnold sighed.

"What?" Helga shook her head, and then found herself looking at Arnold. Not Sir Arnold of whatever medieval times restaurant themed daydream she had just been experiencing, but Arnold; twenty first century twelve year old urbanite. She had returned to the crushing pain of reality. Arnold used to be a chronic daydreamer, and apparently he'd passed the condition onto her now. How much Arnold had said during her fantasizing was a mystery, but she hoped she hadn't missed anything important.

"Sorry this whole thing with my parents keeps getting in the way of... us." Arnold said, "I want to have more time just to do stuff together, but things are just so crazy at home that I-"

"Yeah, yeah, you wanna talk crazy home lives, look what you're marching me towards." Helga huffed, "You might live in a non traditional setting, in a boarding house but at least that's a house. Look at me! I live in a freaking store! And your parents might be weirdos but at least they're not Bob or Miriam."

Arnold looked at her strangely. Helga looked down and realized the two of them had been holding hands all this time, through her daydream and up to the present.

"I know, but at least they don't have to readjust to society." Arnold said.

"Actually, Miriam has to readjust to society every time she wakes up from one too many smoothies…" Helga retorted.

Arnold laughed reflexively, but then stopped himself. He looked at Helga apologetically, but the look in her eye reassured him.

"Sorry…" he said, "You just have a way of making things sound… funny. Even when they're not."

"Ah, would you quit apologizing for everything, football head?" Helga dismissed him, "You're killing the mood… not that there's much of a mood left to kill."

The crushingly sad look on Arnold's face at her last comment cut Helga deeply. She had covered her disappointment by taking sardonic enjoyment in everything going wrong, but she could see just how hard Arnold was trying to show her a good time, even if he wasn't terribly good at it. In all the years she'd stalked him as he tried to court other girls, she should have realized from all his past failed courtships that he just wasn't adept with girls… even if most of those failures had resulted from her own tireless efforts.

"Man, getting you out of your parents' clutches was harder than taking down Scheck or Lasombra… in retrospect, maybe."

Arnold laughed again.

"See?" Arnold said, "I don't exactly have good memories of those guys but… but hearing it from you? You just manage to make everything sound funny… I love that."

Love. He'd said one out of three of the words she was hungry for. If it appeared as he second word in sequence with the other words "I" and "You" the night would be saved.

Yes, it had taken some time for it to dawn on her, but even after he'd kissed her, held her hand, called her his girlfriend, et cetera… he'd still never put into words the feelings that she herself had once so boldly declared to him. When he kissed her in San Lorenzo, Helga felt as though that moment had been building since she first fell in love with him as a tiny child years earlier… yes it was slightly unusual for a three year girl old to fall deeply in love with a boy, she privately admitted to herself years later, but given the amount of love she had been denied from her own family she had to find it elsewhere. Arnold just happened to be the first unfortunate person to ever show her any true, genuine kindness. She shuttered to think of what would have happened had some derelict homeless man had been the one to share his umbrella and compliment her bow.

No… it was more than just that act of kindness that had her sold on Arnold. The aura of warmth and effortless generosity he exuded was something truly rare, and she just happened to be lucky enough to cross paths with him.

"Helga?" Arnold asked.

Helga shook her head again, realizing she'd gotten lost in thought once again.

"Yeah, what?" she responded curtly.

"We're alone…" Arnold said.

True, the streets of Hillwood were quiet. There were people in sight, but none of them paid the tween couple any mind, as they went on preoccupied with their own lives.

"What, scared or something?" Helga chortled.

"No…" Arnold said, "But we're alone so… can I talk to… the real Helga?"

Helga glared at him.

"You're gonna give me schizophrenia if you keep doing this…" Helga said.

"Oh come, on…" Arnold said teasingly, "Can I talk to the real Helga?"

Helga growled in anger, but then she closed her eyes and sighed happily.

"Alright… darling." she said. Her voice, shifted from angry and bitter, to so deeply gushy and in love in a heartbeat it might have given anyone else whiplash.

Helga looked at Arnold with deep adoration, unashamedly so. In these brief instances where she could show her truest, deepest and best self, she felt truly at peace… and at the same time with this side of herself out in the open, she felt at her most vulnerable and most afraid. The multitudes of conflicting and crippling emotions that came just with being herself hurt, and also felt incredible at the same time. It felt something like a huge sneeze that both hurt and felt soothing and relieving all at the same time.

No wonder she just felt angry all the time. That was far easier than this.

"Helga?" Arnold asked.

"Oh Arnold, my sweet… my precious football headed love god…" she cooed.

Arnold laughed, not mockingly but sheepishly.

"That's…" he tried to say, "That's…"

"Too much?" Helga sighed longingly.

"No, no it's… well, okay it's not too much but it's… it's a lot." he said, "I know how you feel about me… and I… I really appreciate it, Helga."

"You… _appreciate_ it?" Helga asked, still smiling but feeling her inscrutable rage building.

Arnold looked at her with a sincere look of admiration. Helga searched his eyes, finding adoration, respect… but she couldn't quite see the one emotion she really wanted from him. She had to remind herself that the boy was a little dense. So dense that she had to dig through layers and layers before getting to his core and finding that spark of love in him. He HAD to love her by now, right? For all she'd suffered through and sacrificed for him, he just had to love her as deeply as she loved him. Yet in his eyes she couldn't see love, only a deep, deep and profound level of like liking her.

"Yeah." Arnold said, sounding ready to start a speech.

Helga clasped her hands together excitedly, thinking this could be it for real this time.

"And you you're really… you're really special to me." Arnold said confidently.

That wasn't good enough for her.

"Special!? What are you, Mr. Simmons now or something!?" Helga snapped, reverting back to her angry persona. "I'm 'special?' Really? That's all you wanna say to me?"

Arnold recoiled in shock. Helga had just enough self awareness to realize her mood swings probably felt akin to blunt instruments bashing poor Arnold over his stupid football head. He was trying to say it… she had to just give him a chance.

"I mean… go on, my darling." she cooed lovingly, returning to her flowery, soppy voice.

"Yeah… go on."

Another voice suddenly rocked both Helga and Arnold out of their private little world. Standing before them was a familiar girl, tall, well-dressed and with a uniquely expensive black bob haircut, holding up her phone and clearly shooting video of them. Helga felt burning rage rise inside herself like magma, ready to erupt. Ruth, Lila and other occasional girls had been unwitting rivals of Helga's in the past, and yet now Rhonda seemed almost eager to intrude on her relationship with Arnold.

"Rhondaloid?" Helga gasped, "Are you stalking us? I'd be mad but… that'd be kinda hypocritical of me… but still! Not cool…"

Hopefully Rhonda's role in Helga's daydream from only minutes ago hadn't been prophetic of this moment. Did she really have a thing for Arnold, now that he was spoken for? Sure, she'd called him 'gallant' before… and admired his unique sense of style… and that he wasn't a bad choice to play Romeo in their school play and-

Rhonda liked Arnold. That became abruptly and infuriatingly clear to Helga.

"Helga, Helga, Helga… this isn't personal." Rhonda said, "This is just business."

"Business?" Arnold asked with a raised eyebrow. "Seriously?"

Rhonda pointed to her phone, now clearly recording them.

"Building an online following is a long, arduous process… and for some reason I'm just not getting the number of clicks I want posting stuff about my own fabulous life… so I thought I'd share juicy stuff about other people! Focusing on others… like what you do, Arnold! It's just my way of getting over my narcissism. You know. Self improvement."

Arnold and Helga looked at Rhonda blankly, neither of them knowing what twisted part of her statement to address first.

"C'mon, you two…" Rhonda urged, "I didn't capture anything you were saying before-"

"Oh good…" Helga said softly, "Then I won't have to gauge your eyes out... and feed you your own phone…"

"Just say something juicy for me…" Rhonda goaded, earning only a silent blank stare from Arnold and Helga.

"Arnold's got a girlfriend! Arnold's got a girlfriend!" Rhonda sang mockingly, now sounding desperate.

"Yeah." Arnold said dispassionately, "I know."

Helga looked at him. There he was, unashamedly admitting to Rhonda's online following the truth; he was Helga G. Pataki's boyfriend. That was worth something.

"Um… Helga's… got a boyfriend!" Rhonda sang, though now less confidently as her taunting failed to phase them.

"Rhonda?" Helga sighed, "Is this some desperate cry for help because of your crushing loneliness at heart?"

"No…" Rhonda muttered wistfully, "That's what posting all the selfies is for…"

"Wow… I mean you do post those by the dozen but uh… Rhonda?" Helga snickered, as her eyes wandered to some nearby garbage, "Don't panic, but I think Curly hiding in that trash can…"

"Am not!" the familiar voice of Thaddeus 'Curly' Gamelthorpe came from the trash can Helga had pointed to.

Rhonda spun around and gasped in horror at the sight of the trash can Curly's voice had come from.

"Curly…?" she said softly.

"Seriously!" Curly shouted as he burst out of the trash can, "I'm not here! Honest! Unless you… want me to be?"

"Ugh!" Rhonda retched in disgust.

Predictably, Curly leapt out of his hiding place, causing Rhonda to flee as he gave chase. Arnold and Helga watched the two of them run off until they disappeared from sight.

"How'd you know he was in there?" Arnold asked, sounding genuinely impressed.

"I didn't. I just assumed." Helga shrugged, sounding impressed with herself, "Where she goes, he tails. Trust me, I played the stalker game for years- I mean… y'know I…."

Helga tugged at her collar sheepishly as Arnold just laughed. They hadn't addressed every solitary little act of stalking behavior Helga had exhibited in the past, but Arnold had clearly come to reinterpret and understand many of her past antics, seeing them as true acts of… like liking. Helga sighed as she returned to the uncomfortable feeling that he didn't really feel true love for her, but just deep like liking her.

Their walk through the dark urban streets of Hillwood had finally brought them to the beeper emporium Helga called home. Helga didn't exactly have he sort of space they could just hang out in, and she knew Arnold understood that her 'house' was a no go zone for him. Once she crossed the boarder into the emporium, that would be it for the evening. Helga's sapphire eyes met Arnold's emerald eyes yet again, and she felt her heart pounding; longing to hear him just say those three little words.

"I uh…" Arnold began, "I had a good time with you, tonight. Even if my mom and dad kind of messed everything up." He sighed, "Helga? Thanks for understanding… my mom and dad are kind of… strange, I know… but-"

"Hey, is there anything else you want to say to me before we say goodnight, or are you just gonna keep going on about your…" Helga stopped in mid sentence as her eyes went wide. She could not believe what she saw standing in the shadows now. Well, yes, she could but it infuriated her.

"They're standing right behind me, aren't they…" Arnold sighed.

"No..." Helga uttered in quiet terror, "Just a crazed street thug in a leather jacket with burning eyes who looks like he won a staring contest with the devil…"

In his fright, Arnold jumped and did a one eighty turn which brought him face to face with his smiling parents. Before he could register it was them he gasped in terror, but then as reality sank in he turned back to Helga and glared at her.

Miles and Stella had apparently followed them here with all the quiet stealth and cunning of a pair of ninjas, and now stood just feet away from them grinning inanely. Helga couldn't resist messing with Arnold even in tense moments like this.

"Oh don't let us interrupt!" Stella said eagerly.

"Yeah!" Miles chimed in, "Go on, Arnold! Tell her!"

"Tell her… what? Dad…" Arnold groaned, "What are you guys doing here?"

"We just…" Stella stammered, "Wanted to… make sure you were okay…"

"Relax, mom." Arnold insisted, "I'm real careful on the streets at night. I got mugged once, and I learned from tha-"

"You got mugged!?" Stella gasped, and she quickly knelt down to caress her boy's face in her concern.

"And you never told us!?" Miles asked, "Seriously… you told us all about that thing your friend Iggy made you do. The thing with the bunny pajamas… and not that you were mugged?"

"Somehow the bunny pajama incident was more traumatic…" Arnold said.

"Oh he's got roughly a hundred stories to tell." Helga noted, "He can't just tell you all of 'em at once."

"Exactly!" Stella cried, suddenly sounding to be on the verge of tears, "We… we missed so much… there's so much we don't know…about you… Arnold..."

Helga felt her heart sink. Arnold's parents had been suffocating him for months now. The two saps had missed out on most of his life, so of course they'd want to get in as much bonding time as humanly possible. Helga's own parents had missed most of her life too, they just had a much weaker excuse than being lost in the jungle, and her thoughts on that just made her angry again. And Helga's anger invariably had the same result: lashing out.

"Will you two just leave us alone for two seconds!" she shouted.

Miles, Stella, and Arnold too looked at Helga in shock. Miles and Stella quietly looked at their son. The three of them just seemed to silently and wordlessly communicate, and all three of them nodded.

"Okay…" Miles said, "Okay… we'll go. We'll just leave you two… alone…"

"Arnold shouldn't be alone! He's been alone for-" Stella shouted abruptly, but then covered he mouth with her hand, surprised by her own outburst, "I mean… yes… we'll just… leave you two…" she gulped, and said her next word very bitterly, "Alone…"

And then, like two otherworldly specters, Miles and Stella stepped backwards into the dark, disappearing from sight like the semi mystical presences they seemed like. Helga slowly turned her attention back to Arnold. The boy looked numb, as if trying to understand how he should feel and just short-circuiting.

"Heh, well… it's just us now…" Helga said, "Guess we should say goodnight… and whatever else you're supposed to say to the girl of your dreams…"

Arnold looked at her and she could immediately sense the pain he felt, but he smiled nonetheless.

"See you tomorrow, Helga." Arnold said, opening his arms to invite her to hug, "We can hang out all day if you want."

That sounded amazing of course… and still it wasn't good enough. Here they were, standing in the moonlight and the unromantic setting of Big Bob's Beepers… but still! Being in one another's presence should have been enough to evoke feelings in Arnold that would drag the worlds 'I love you' out of him… but apparently not!

"Arnold… can you just… say it…" Helga urged.

"Say what?" Arnold asked, sounded genuinely and innocently oblivious.

"The thing… the thing I always tell you…" Helga said.

"Move it football head?" Arnold answered.

"No… not that…"

"Move it, bucko?"

"I say more than just that kinda crap!" Helga shouted, as the floodgates finally burst open, "Like… I love you! How about that? I LOVE you, Arnold! I love you like your mom loves your dad! Like my mom loves smoothies! Like my dad loves beepers! Like Olga loves herself! Like meteors love dinosaurs! I LOVE YOU! Can't you just… say you love me too?"

Arnold stepped backwards, looking slightly perturbed now.

"What? Well yeah… of course I…" he stumbled.

"Then say it!" Helga pressed him. "Or do you even love me?"

"I do! I can say it!" Arnold insisted.

"Okay then say it!" Helga shouted.

"Fine! I lo-" Arnold coughed, "Sorry… something in my throat… I lo-" he tried again but seemed to choke on his own words.

Helga's eyes went wide with shock.

"I lo-" Arnold kept trying to say, but just couldn't say the words, "I lo-" he tried one last time but then just looked back at Helga hopelessly.

A silence fellow over the preteen couple, one so strong they felt it pushing them both away from one another.

"Uh oh…" Arnold uttered quietly.

"You… I… you… don't… just… go!" Helga shouted, "Go on! Go home! Go home to your parents! Those freaks who love you so much!"

Helga was shouting angrily, but felt on the verge of tears as she chastised Arnold for having overly loving parents… the sort of problem she secretly wished she had.

"Helga, listen… I…" Arnold tried to explain.

"Just go, and let's not ever discuss this again! Ever!" Helga screeched, now fully consumed by pure unchecked emotion, and unfortunately not a positive one.

Arnold himself, normally a paragon of calm serenity and understanding, broke down and gritted his teeth in frustration.

"Alright, fine!" he snapped, "Sorry I couldn't make everything perfect for you!"

Without another word, Arnold spun on his heel and stomped off in the direction his parents had left in. Helga stood on her doorstep seething, and unable to process the multitude of emotions coursing through her.

"Hmm, Arnold…" she muttered to herself at last, "After everything I've done for him… reuniting him with his long lost loser parents, he STILL can't just up and tell me he… loves… but does he love me? Oh Arnold…"

Helga felt her heart sinking like the Titanic. She reached into her shirt, pulled out her locket and gazed into the picture of Arnold that it displayed.

"Oh Arnold… why is this still image of you so much easier to talk to than the real you? Yes, I suppose because a picture of you always knows the right thing to say because it says whatever I want it to… but still! Why can't you just be a mirror unto my tortured soul and reflect those very words that I've so selflessly thrust upon you… I love you… if you only understood the walls I've had to tear down just to obtain the right and privilege to confide those words to you… the years I've suffered through, longing for the day I could finally say that I love you! And then have to go even further by waking your parents from that quasi mystical sleeping sickness and thus PROVE how much love you… only for you to… kiss me in return… sharing with me the sweet brush of your lips… and still not telling me that you love me!"

It felt strange, but the subject of Arnold's parents felt inexorably linked to her relationship with him. What could that mean?

"Your parents… your long lost parents. Those unseen, unobtainable figures that you saw as some gateway into the sublime rapture of normalcy… the things that most of us kids have the misfortune to have in our lives, but to you were the unreachable ordinary thing you craved in your so unordinary life… and yet now… now they've disappointed you. I gave you the thing you wanted. I gave you your parents, thus bestowing unto you what you wanted… but was that not enough? Mayhap your parents are not living up to what you so sorely needed in your life? And thus your disappointment with them has carried over into your… disappointment with me… Helga G. Pataki… holder of the cosmic keystone that brought you together with your parents. Perhaps a perfect fairy tail ending has fizzled away into bitter reality…? Or worse… hath your weirdo parents not met your expectations for a normal life?"

And then, something clicked in Helga's brain and she got an idea. An awful idea. Helga got a wonderful awful idea.

"I brought you together… and you want a normal life with them… then I've gotta fix them and make them… normal…"

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**Helga... well intentioned but... flawed in her methods... be afraid. **


	4. Love Stooped

**Reviewer responses: **

**Kryten: Suuuuuuuuuurely. Hmm, actually you've got me wanting to change the outcome of her plan, just to shake things up.**

**The JAM aka Numbuh i: Psh, the best course of action makes for an uninteresting story, say I. That's why everyone makes very poor decisions in my world. ;) What can't Rhonda ruin, I ask? And thank you, on the fantasy sequence. **

**Anonymous Latino: There's a reason… or two… or three… we shall see…**

**Upside to a worldwide health crisis? It cleared out my schedule and I have very, very, very little to do right now besides fret and write fan fiction...**

**Aheheh heh heh… heh...**

**Thanks for making me always try to find a silver lining, Arnold… this fic will now abruptly change gears, with Stella being forced to create a cure for COVID-19. Too soon? Yes it is. Or is it?**

* * *

Chapter 4: Love Stooped

As they had since the moment they had been reunited with Arnold, Miles and Stella vigilantly remained within the vicinity all through their boy's goodnight to his girlfriend, but not so close that they could hear them clearly. Now and then they did exercise just a modicum of discreteness. In their own minds they weren't ones to pry… Arnold's life just interested them more than any ancient civilization, rare disease or insert exotic thing they'd seen around the world here. All they could hear now was Helga shouting, which might have alarmed and terrified most mortal men, but they both knew that was fairly normal for her… even in her best of moods. Unsurprisingly for a pair of kids on the cusp of their teen years, the two kids had kept their relationship mostly private from their prying parents, which naturally just encouraged Miles and Stella to want to pry more, feeling it to be their parental duty.

And therein lay the tragedy: they both felt they had parental duties, but what exactly those duties were eluded them. For even the least prepared new parents in the world there was at least a learning curve over time, but for these two parents recently recovered from a ten year coma, transitioning straight from changing diapers to attempting to dealing with their boy beginning dating was a tad overwhelming. Stella figured most mothers always saw their sons as their little baby boys forever… just not in the complete literal sense as she felt. In her mind half the time Arnold was still just a little tyke just taking his first steps. She wasn't quite sure how Miles felt, but she knew he felt equally guilty for leaving Arnold ten long years ago.

She knew one thing for certain, for both Miles and her, the age old saying 'they grow up so fast' was the understatement of the millennium… and they'd woken up to a new one of those, too which wasn't helping their adjustment.

"I know they uh, told us off and everything but… shouldn't we keep a closer eye on them?" Miles asked anxiously. "Just in case they get a little too… you know… _friendly_, or something?"

Stella considered. She had to actively remind herself that she should give Arnold just a little space once in a while. She could give him just a few minutes. One to five minutes. Yeah. That should be enough for him.

"Nah, they're twelve." Stella shook her head, "What's the worst they could do?"

"You don't think they'd…" Miles spoke hesitantly, but then shook his head, "No… no they probably couldn't figure that out…"

Helga's distant shouting continued to echo down the dark city street where Miles and Stella stood. Stella smiled fawningly. Despite having been chewed out by the girl minutes earlier, Stella felt a unique affinity for Helga, on top of everything she'd done for the Shortman family, Stella just inexplicably felt that she understood the moody girl. Helga wasn't a perfect reflection of Stella herself at that age, but she wasn't far off either.

"Ah, to be young and passionately in love like that… isn't it cute the way she expresses herself so strongly?" Stella asked.

"Yeah." Miles agreed, then he smiled cheekily at his wife, "Kind of reminds me of someone I used to know."

"What?" Stella abruptly gritted her teeth and glared at Miles, prompting him to jump back in slight terror, "You mean the spark's gone out of our marriage? Or wait… someone else you used to know? Who? Some ex girlfriend you never told me about? Someone I need to know of? What, are you living a double life with another family somewhere on the other side of-"

"No!" Miles pleaded, "No, no! You! I meant you… you know, you were always… so…"

Miles trailed off as he saw an impish sparkle in his wife's eyes, and that she was holding back laughter.

"I'm only having fun, you big lunk..." Stella reassured him, placing her hand on his shoulder, "We haven't had enough fun lately."

Miles just laughed reluctantly in his relief.

"You… really know how to keep things fresh after all this time." he said, "I mean, not that it _feels _like we've been married for thirteen years."

Stella nodded, as she wandered off into thought yet again about just how much of her life had slipped by.

"Let me think... we missed the cotton, leather, flower, wood, iron, copper, bronze, pottery, and tin anniversaries… which one are we on now?"

"Um… I don't really… how do you know all of those?" Miles asked.

"Men…" Stella sighed, and then snapped her fingers as the answer came to her, "Steel, that's the next one. We haven't missed our steel anniversary."

Miles smiled in his adorably dorky way.

"I mean, hey at least we've made it this far without any real relationship issues." he said optimistically, "And... this was a… double date was it not?"

Miles reached out his hand and bowed to her slightly. Stella took his hand and they both squeezed hands eagerly.

"Why yes, yes it was…" Stella said, as she looked at Miles.

"I don't wanna brag, but even after everything, I think I might be the luckiest guy in the world," Miles said, "After all this time, and after everything we've been through, I still feel the same way about you now like I did the moment I met you."

"What? You mean your love hasn't grown any stronger since then!?" Stella fumed, as she released Miles's hand and crossed her arms.

"You can't fool me twice…" Miles say playfully, "At least not that quickly-"

"Oh, I'm not kidding this time, big boy!" Stella hissed threateningly.

Miles recoiled, "I uh… I mean I-"

Stella laughed warmly yet again, and Miles quickly realized he'd been had yet again. Miles shook his head and felt Stella's infectious laughter tickle him.

"Was I always this gullible?" he asked, "Or did the sleeping sickness do that?"

"You are just too easy, Mr. Sensitive." Stella laughed, but then she took Miles's hand in hers and kissed him on the cheek, "Never change."

"Right…" Miles said sounding somewhat fatigued now, "Like I said… no real relationship issues… I just understand you too well."

"I guess, but it does kind of feel like we cheated though…" Stella joked, "There's not much to fight over when you're asleep… not even who was hogging the covers… which for the record is _you _now."

"Oh, I could never fight with you." Miles laughed, "I'd be too scared to… I couldn't win…"

"How do you know that?" Stella asked, almost taking that as a challenge, "If you never try you'll never… Arnold?"

"I'll never Arnold? I guess that's true, but what does that really mean..." Miles scratched his head, but then he saw his son wandering in their directions, staring downward with his hands in his pockets. His expression was even more aloof than normal, and was bordering on almost… enraged. Or as close to truly angry as their boy was capable of being.

"Arnold?" they asked in unison.

"I figured you'd be hanging around." he grumbled bitterly, "As usual…"

Miles and Stella looked at one another in concern as Arnold stomped by and continued down the sidewalk. They quickly set off after him and followed behind him in silence for a minute or so.

"Arnold?" Stella asked at last.

"What?" Arnold responded curtly.

His tone of voice silenced both of his parents, who just looked at one another desperately for answers, with no answers coming to either of them. Arnold kept walking out in front with his back to both of them.

"Did you and Helga have an argument or something?" Stella called after him.

Arnold sighed, "When are we _not_ having one? That's a better question..."

"You weren't earlier, until we showed up- oh." Miles trailed off as something clicked in his mind.

"Yeah." Arnold said bitterly, "Thanks for that."

Miles and Stella's eyes met, and once again they realized they'd screwed up and taken a little too long to realize just how badly they'd screwed up.

"Arnold?" Stella began to speak, but then Arnold turned around and looked back at them.

Arnold looked up at his parents, who held each others hands as they stared at him with concerned eyes, both too afraid to speak for fear of saying the wrong thing. As their eyes met Arnold squinted at them. True displays of anger from Arnold came around with the frequency of shows of pure happiness from Helga, but there was more to his half-lided gaze than just anger. There was anger in his eyes for sure, but he looked almost at war with himself, as he tried to hold back his feelings. As his frustrated expression gradually softened, he started to look more inquisitive, as if searching the page of a book for just the right word. After staring at them in silence for a painfully silent minute or so, Arnold's glare melted away and he sighed ruefully.

"Mom? Dad?" he asked.

"Arnold?" they both asked.

"Can you tell me, well... what was it like... when you two first met?" Arnold asked, in a calm tone.

Miles and Stella both blinked in surprise. They had been bracing themselves for a burst of preteen angst, which they were slowly realizing they might have deserved, but at least it wouldn't have blindsided them like this.

"When we first met?" Stella repeated, "Why do you want to know that?"

"It's complicated, please can you just tell me?" Arnold asked again.

"What was it like?" Miles asked, "Well, it was kind of buggy and humid… pretty typical weather for that region, but I was pretty used to it by that point so-"

"I think he means… you know." Stella gave him a strange look, "What was it _like?"_

"Oh, you mean like that…" Miles sounded embarrassed, "Right, right. Well, it was... pretty painful..."

"Painful?" Arnold and Stella asked in unison.

"Well, yeah." Miles shrugged, "I'd just slipped down the face of a cliff and sprained my arm, and I think I broke a few toes too, but then…" Miles looked at Stella, "But then somehow… from that moment on, all that pain just went away every time I looked at this woman right here... of course, it helped that she was a doctor and patched me up right away… but just looking at her made me feel things I'd never felt before. Almost like I'd found exactly what I'd been looking for all my life, without even knowing what I'd been looking for. Right then and there I knew that I'd never want to see another doctor again, because seeing your mother for the first time just felt like… well, like…"

"Love at first sight?" Arnold asked.

Miles and Stella gazed into one another's eyes and they both grinned.

"Well, Arnold let me put it like this." Miles said, "When you're the kind of guy who's constantly injuring himself on a daily basis, the moment you meet someone as smart, beautiful, compassionate and fun as this woman right here, and on top of that one who can_ also_ bandage you up at a moments notice… well, any other feeling than love was just impossible." he turned to Stella and smiled lovingly, "I knew right away that you completed me."

Stella returned his smile and rested her shoulder on Miles's shoulder, and as she lost herself in his eyes she sighed contentedly. She closed her eyes and inclined her head upwards… but then abruptly remembered her son was standing there watching, and she quickly returned her attention to him.

"Oh… right… is everything okay, Arnold?" Stella asked, "With… Helga?"

Arnold sighed, "It was a lousy end to a lousy date…"

"What happened?" Miles asked, "Hey… I'm sorry we tagged along. We didn't mean to ruin things but, we just want to get to know Helga better if she's close to-"

"It's not even that, Dad. It was what just happened now… she… she wanted me to say something to her." Arnold said, "Something I'd never told her before… and I didn't even really realize I hadn't said it before tonight. And when I tried to say it I just… I just couldn't. And I don't know why. Now I'm all confused and I'm wondering if we..."

Arnold gulped, and Miles and Stella could both feel the painful confusion their son was going through.

"I mean, I like Helga a lot." Arnold said, "And not just like, I really... _like_ like her. She's really funny, smart, passionate, but… it feels like we still just fight all the time. Like back in the days when she was just a bully, before I really got why she was so angry all the time. And I've tried to help her with it, but I don't think it's working, so now…" Arnold took a deep breath, "… now I'm not sure if we're going to last… I mean, if you really love someone, why would you just fight all the time?"

Stella looked at Miles and braced herself. She could dish out medical advice with the kind of ease that most people just casually discussed the weather, but now she was getting into a whole new territory. Since returning to Hillwood, Arnold still hadn't run out of questions for her about her past life in San Lorenzo, but those were all questions about her and Miles… he hadn't really gotten into asking for life advice. The boy seemed remarkably well adjusted and almost impossibly wise for his age, and apart from occasional homework help he never really seemed in need of their help. Now here he stood asking for relationship advice and Stella instantly felt out of her element.

"How do you two do it?" Arnold asked.

Miles looked at him in alarm, "Do… what exactly?"

"How do you... you know? Come back from fighting?" Arnold asked, "Helga and I just keep fighting, and I mean, you guys don't really fight that often… or… at all really."

"Oh, Arnold," Stella denied, "Of course Miles and I… fight… now and then."

She looked at Miles for help but he just smiled back guilelessly.

"Fight? Why would we fight?" he asked, "You can't argue with perfection, and that's just what you are to me."

"Not now…" Stella nudged him with her elbow gently, "Really, Arnold… we were uh… we were just fighting about uh... you hogging the covers?"

"Yeah, sorry about that." Miles said, "We can add a few extra blankets tonight."

"Okay, great." Stella said happily, but then she remembered why they were trying to have an argument, "Oh. Well, that wrapped up quickly... um. Seriously, Arnold... just the other day your dad and I were arguing about… about um… Abner!"

"Abner?" Arnold asked.

"Yeah, I wanted to name her Isabelle and he wanted to name him Abner!" Stella insisted.

"Mom, that was a long time ago… before I was born." Arnold said.

"Then how do you even know- the journal. Right." Stella sighed, and then she glared at Miles, "Why did you have to record every single solitary detail? Now Arnold knows all about us! See? See, Arnold? We're fighting! Like normal parents!"

"No you're not." Arnold sighed.

"No… no we're not…" Stella too sighed in return.

"It's not my fault you're the perfect woman." Miles said, "That's all on you."

"And it's not my fault you're the best guy ever…" Stella fawned, "Wow, we _are_ bad at this…"

Stella shot Miles a look of faux anger perfectly blended with flirtatiousness… she couldn't even fake anger at him. Miles returned her look with a sheepish grin. In their hearts and minds they were still young newlyweds, on an extended honeymoon that had never really ended, even after they'd had little Arnold. Fast forward to now and that just didn't feel natural. Arnold appeared to echo that sentiment as he turned and began heading down the sidewalk again.

"Come on." he said, "Let's all just go home and forget tonight ever happened…"

As she watched her son sadly sulk away, a revelation came over Stella. Arnold must have based his entire concept of love based on the example that she and Miles had set. And that concept had been revealed mostly through romanticized stories about her and Miles that Grandpa had told to Arnold. Stella didn't believe in the kind of true love in fairy tales… and that's why it continued to amaze her that she had somehow landed exactly that with Miles. Sure, she enjoyed teasing him but that was only because she adored his reactions, and that only made her adore him more. And she knew just from the look in his eyes that he felt nothing but pure adoration for everything about her… the more and more she thought about it their relationship was just absurdly perfect. And that shouldn't be possible, yet somehow it was!

* * *

Only fifty feet away, a similar revelation came over someone watching the Shortmans from her hiding place in the dumpster behind the beeper emporium. Helga stared through a pair of night vision binoculars and witnessed the entire exchange between Arnold and his parents. How did she hear him from so far away, you might ask? Well it wasn't as if she'd planted some kind of listening device on Arnold months earlier… that would just be a step too far. Of course she wouldn't do a thing like that… perish the thought...

Regardless of how, Helga had heard the whole thing. Now she came over feeling numb as she tried to process everything. Even in a state of numbness, Helga's natural reaction to anything was to monologue to an audience consisting of herself.

"Okay, so Arnold has doubts… that's understandable… and those doubts have been spurred on by how he sees his parents' relationship, which in spite of their sheer weird self-aware dorkiness… really is infuriatingly perfect. Oh, Arnold… I've always known in my most twisted little heart that you my darling are my other half, my one true love, my… dare I say? Soulmate! But... how could you be if you have such doubts? Okay, sure you're infinitely more lovable than me, so I've got the easy part: loving you. That doesn't help… oh Arnold you poor creature, you've been tasked with the most insurmountable task ever put upon any soul that has ever walked this earth… loving _me._"

Helga sighed sadly, but then she considered Miles and Stella again.

"Miles and Stella Shortman… now those two are bonafide soulmates, no question. The two of them walk around like a pair of gods among the mere mortals dwelling on this terrestrial dirt ball. Of course they're gods among men… to have spawned Arnold my football headed love god they'd have to be… but alack the day, I myself am nothing so divine… mayhap someone descended from such pure divine goodness could never truly love me? Worse still... if the hallowed bond between you and your parents isn't to your liking... then how could you love the girl who brought them back to your world? Oh…" she sighed despairingly. "If only there was some way to make them less gods among men, and more just regular-"

Suddenly without warning, the lid of the dumpster opened with violent force, putting her speech to an abrupt halt. Helga gasped and snapped her head upward to see her father, Big Bob Pataki the Beeper king standing over her with a trash back in his hand. From the look on his face he was even more alarmed than her.

"What the-?" Bob gasped, "Helga?"

Helga just stared at her father with wide eyes, and then grinned awkwardly, unable to think of some snarky excuse for why she was hiding in a dumpster.

"You uh… sleeping out here tonight or something?" Bob asked gruffly.

"Maybe…?" Helga replied sheepishly.

"Huh." Bob scratched his head, "Well, alright. Just uh… don't stay up too late. A growing girl still needs her sleep. Hey, move over, will ya?"

He dropped the trash bag into the dumpster. Helga scooted aside as it came crashing down next to her.

"Well, goodnight Olga." Bob said, closing the dumpster lid again. As she sat in darkness, Helga could hear him shouting, "Miriam! Have we got any pork rinds left? I'm starving! Why's the fridge always empty these days?"

Helga could just faintly hear her mother mutter something incomprehensible, which just sent Bob into another tirade. She couldn't make out a word of what he was shouting, but the sheer volume that echoed from inside the store out into her dumpster was enough for her to get the message.

"Okay, Miles and Stella are nigh perfect weirdos, but at least they're not-"

As she continued to listen to Bob's raging, suddenly something else clicked in Helga's brain. She snapped her fingers as a broad smile crossed her face.

"That's it!" she rubbed her hands together as a plan formed in her mind, "If Arnold and his parents can't relate because Miles and Stella's relationship is too perfect… all I gotta do is find something that they can _really_ fight about! And then they'll be a normal couple, Arnold will lower his standards just a little bit… and maybe he'll finally truly love me without a shadow of a doubt! First I save them from their sleeping sickness, and now I have to save them from themselves… oh the lengths I go for the one I love. Helga, you are the best girlfriend ever. Yay me!"

A sudden chill fell over her as she felt an unwelcome presence. A raspy, rhythmic inhale and exhaling sound appeared from just outside the dumpster. Helga frowned, and then she threw open the lid, which smacked the hapless Brainy in the face and knocked him off his feet. Helga then leapt out of he dumpster, dusted herself off, straightened the bow atop her head, and swaggered back inside the store, leaving Brainy lying in a daze on the pavement.

* * *

Now several blocks from the Pataki residence, the Shortmans continued to head back to the boarding house in awkward silence. Arnold walked out in front of his mom and dad, with both of them trailing behind, still holding each others' hands. Miles felt guilty for helping to ruin Arnold's date with Helga of course, but not enough to let go of Stella's hand. Of course, the realization that his nigh perfect bond with his wife was somehow causing his son anguish was a mental and emotional minefield to navigate.

"Hey, Arnold? Don't worry about Helga… she'll come around." Miles said, "You're only kids, you don't have to have everything about love figured out yet… I mean, I'd be more alarmed if you already had. You're both still learning."

Arnold returned Miles's attempt at consolation with a blank, hopeless look.

"You make it sound so easy." Arnold sighed, "You just looked at mom and knew how you felt right away? You're lucky."

"Yeah." Miles agreed, looking slightly possessed, "It's true... I really am a lucky guy-"

Miles suddenly felt the toe of his shoe collide with a hunk of pavement sticking up, sending him tripping forward. With and awkward yet somehow graceful little dance, he caught himself and stood back up and continued walking as if nothing had happened.

"See?" Miles said, "With the number of times that happens, you'd think I'd be dead by now..."

"It just wasn't like that for me when I first met Helga…" Arnold continued, having barely noticed his father's near fall, "I don't even really remember the first time we met, we were just preschoolers. I just remember her always being around… so how do I know if I'm really in… you know, love?"

"Well, Arnold… love is… love is like… it's like…" Miles looked around desperately for some inspiration to finish his simile, and with limited options he settled for the steps before them.

"Uh, love is like a… stoop…" he continued.

"A stoop?" Arnold repeated flatly, thoroughly unconvinced.

"Yeah… in that it's… you know? Metaphorical." Miles said.

"For what exactly?" Arnold asked.

"Just gimme a minute, my degree wasn't in poetry…" Miles fumbled for an answer but then he was abruptly cut off.

"Hey!" a threatening voice voice caused Miles and Stella to jump, but didn't phase Arnold. The couple turned and saw a deranged looking teenage boy with wild feral eyes emerging from the shadows, "Stay away from my stoop!"

Miles grabbed his son's shoulders and pulled him close, but Arnold's casual reaction reassured him quickly.

"Not now, Stoop Kid." Arnold sighed, nonchalantly.

"Oh." the teenager said calmly as he stepped backwards, "Hey, Arnold… I uh… sure… just uh, remind them to stay away from my stoop, will ya?"

"Right." Arnold said as he passed him by.

Miles and Stella looked at one another and blinked. Then they looked back to this so called 'Stoop Kid' who was still glaring at them, crouched like a wild cougar ready to pounce. With a spring in their steps they both swiftly followed after Arnold.

"So anyway, yeah, love is like a stoop…" Miles tried to continue his earlier assertion, "There's a lot of stoops out there, but if there's one that's extra special you just uh, always want to be around and you don't want anyone going near it… like that guy. This town is full of more characters than I remember... this isn't helping is it?"

Arnold didn't even look up to dignify that with a response this time, and he just continued on his way. Miles couldn't blame him of course. Even he wasn't convinced by his own stoop metaphor. He'd gone straight from helping his son take his first few baby steps, to having to try to explain what love was. Every single bitter reminder that he had missed out on so much of Arnold's life that he could never reclaim hurt him deeply, and he knew Stella felt equally if not more pain with that burden. For the first month or so, everything had felt beyond perfect, like a dream come true. Arnold had just looked at them like a godsend, and the three of them felt nothing but pure unbound love for each other, but slowly the gravity reality had crept in, and the truth had become impossible to ignore: they couldn't give Arnold the life he deserved. The boy had had to deal with enough craziness for one lifetime and deserved some normalcy, but that wasn't going to change any time soon.

As Arnold headed up the stood of the boarding house and opened the door, the usual stampede of assorted feral critters poured out of the door and down into the street. Miles watched Arnold disappear inside, and then he turned to Stella. Wordlessly they both shared their deepest regret, one concerning a promise they had made their little boy long ago, and one they had broken. It was a promise that they both felt compelled to try to renew every day, only to realize it was impossible. That didn't soften the blow for either of them.

* * *

**Promise? What promise? Ah, you've all seen 'The Journal' you know the one...**

**I guess there's a little bit of a continuity issue between 'Parents Day' and 'The Journal.' In the first telling of how Miles and Stella met, they're both talking about a cloud pattern and debating whether it looks more like a clipper or a schooner, and then in 'The Journal' they just introduce themselves, and Stella patches him up. I actually like the first version better but… I guess I have to go with the latter purely because that was taken directly from Miles's journal, whereas the other can be seen as just Grandpa's telling from memory… which I guess means they could have had that schooner debate at some point but… does any of this really matter? Probably not…**


	5. I Came Here For an Argument

_**Reviewer Responses:**_

_**Kryten: Yeah, they're a barrel of fun… and getting more fun every social isolating day!**_

_**I'd not touched upon that character yet. Had to get him in eventually.**_

_**The JAM aka Numbuh i: I think TJM might have been the third or fourth time in the whole series that she actually came up with the right solution to something…**_

_**Heh… actually they have been pretty permissive… considering they're kids dating at age 12 they're being very permissive. They just won't quite give them space. **_

_**Anonymous Latino: The subtext of Arnold's feelings for Helga in my stories come more from the actual series than anything I've written. If you watch the entire series (and maybe I'm reading too much into things) there are several moments sprinkled throughout that suggest Arnold really kinda does love Helga, he just doesn't really understand his own feelings yet (cuz that's kind of his subtle character arc throughout: understanding love… or girls at the very least). He's constantly hyper aware of Helga's presence and… well, there's a future chapter coming up that I hope will put this all into context… don't wanna spoil it. And honestly a lot of your last review predicted a few things I'm gonna get into in future chapters…**_

_**Veganmama: Glad I could provide some solace in the world in these crazy times. Feedback like that makes writing these stories worth it. Thank you.**_

_**I honestly have more trouble writing normal dialogue than I do with Helga's little poetic riffs… which may be why she resonated so strongly with me when I was a kid, I too was known for speaking in overly dramatic flowery prose… just not as adeptly as she did! XD**_

_**A/N: Detractors of the portrayal of Arnold's parents in both the show and TJM tend to argue the same point: Miles and Stella are too perfect, therefore they're boring and not engaging or believable. I don't agree with this sentiment. I thought that the creators instilled the characters with so much warmth and heart (Craig himself voicing Miles helped…) that they're impossible for me to dislike, BUT… I can at least appreciate the argument that they're not interesting characters and too perfect, even if I don't agree. To play with that perception of them, I figured it would be interesting to have their big character flaws (apart from their ambiguous mental capacities post sleeping sickness…) be that their relationship is just seemingly too perfect in the eyes of others, and have that become a wedge between them and Arnold and Helga. I touched on that briefly in 'Suzie Come Home' but it's in full focus this time.**_

_**This chapter was tricky… you all know what Helga is planning but I was worried about her pushing it just a little too far to the point where she'd seem irredeemable… well, let's begin with a little Phil and Gertie brand levity.**_

* * *

Chapter 5: I Came Here For an Argument

The next day, after an uneventful Saturday morning, Stella and Miles now sat at the kitchen table of the Sunset Arms, staring into their cups of tea and not sure of what to say or do. It was beginning to feel like whenever they weren't out in the city failing at readjusting to society, they were in here moping. It seemed to correlate with their son's moods, and even being tuned in as such with his moodiness didn't give them the sort of bond they wanted with them.

Cooking lunch nearby stood Phil, Arnold's grandpa and Miles's father. He paused in his effort and gave his son and daughter in law the once over, then frowned and shook his head.

"You kids need to get out more. Go on! It's Saturday! Go out and play!" Phil urged, "I'll tell you when your mac and cheese is ready."

"I'm a grown man, dad…" Miles groaned.

"Coulda fooled me." his father retorted with expert comedic timing, so much that all present thought they heard drum cymbal sting, "Go on, short man, I know you're in a hurry to be my age when you can just hang around the house all day, but you're still young! Go out and live life! Or did that jungle incident make you agoraphobic or something?"

Miles shivered. That last comment might have had just a little truth to it. Both he and Stella had often been reluctant to leave the boarding house, at least whenever Arnold was around. Even when Arnold desperately wanted to be left alone, neither he nor Stella could bring themselves to give him space.

"I just don't know what to do about Arnold…" Miles sighed, "We owe him so much love and attention… the kind he didn't get in all that time we were gone-"

"Now wait just a doggone minute!" Phil pointed a wooden spoon at his son, "You two might've been out of the picture, but Pookie and I gave him more love than any kid on earth ever deserved! As for the attention though… you might wanna ease up on that, just a little… give him some space-"

"But then he'll feel abandoned!" Miles said with raw terror in his eyes, as he flashed back to the day Stella and he left when Arnold was a baby. Stella rubbed her hand on his and tried to smile reassuringly, though the look in her eye suggested she felt similarly.

"I won't abandon him… not again…" Miles panted.

"Sheesh, you're nearly as dramatic as your mother…" Phil sighed, "Don't worry, short man. You lucked out and came into Arnold's life just as he's becoming a teenager. You know, that magical age when all kids start hating their parents regardless of how good a job they did? It happened with you… well, it didn't happen for me… I was already working in the factories and then going off to war… didn't have time to hate my parents… but my point is before you know it Arnold will be in his twenties and he'll love you again. You know, once he's on his own and realizes you're his meal ticket."

"Thanks… dad…" Miles sighed. "That's very… helpful."

"There, see?" Phil said, not missing his son's sarcasm, "Parenting is hard. I'm over three quarters of a century old and even I haven't completely figured it out."

"I on the other hand…" the voice of Miles's mother Gertie said, prompting the others to turn and see the old woman standing in the doorway, dressed in an eighteenth century minuteman uniform, "A veteran of the Revolutionary War, in my three hundred odd years on this crazy planet… I alone have discovered the true secret to proper parenting..."

Miles, Stella and Phil all just blinked as they stared at the eccentric old woman, whose roleplaying antics they all knew and tolerated.

"Okay…" Stella said, "I'll bite. What is it?"

"What's what?" Gertie asked obliviously.

"The secret?" Stella asked.

"Secret what?" Gertie asked again.

"The one you were just telling us!" Stella urged, with fire entering her tone.

"The secret!" Gertie shouted with sudden realization, "Of course… the secret plans that I have intercepted… the Redcoat invasion strategy. Well, fear not fellow colonials! We're still one step ahead of them… they'll be two squeals from the pig in the window if they're coming by land, one if by sea!"

Gertie snapped her attention to Abner, who everyone just now noticed was sitting atop the kitchen counter with his head poked out the window. Suddenly he let loose a loud squeal, followed by a second… and then a third!

"They're cheating! They're coming by land and sea!" Gertie gasped, and without hesitating she ran for the door, grabbed her musket and declared, "Come! We ride through every village and town! Wake every citizen and tell them the enemy comes from afar! With a hey nonny-nonny and a ha-cha-char! Ahahahahaha!"

With irrepressible puppy dog excitement, Gertie bolted from the kitchen and out the front door as the others just watched, unable to react with sort of concern most normal people might have to the old woman's eccentric performance.

"Well, I'd better go keep an eye on her." Phil sighed, and he dashed off after his wife shouting, "Pookie! Don't run with the bayonet! What kind of example is that for the kids- oh, hello?" Miles noted his father's tone shifting, "Who are you?"

Miles and Stella listened as Phil addressed a visitor on the front stoop.

"I uh, my name is uh… Joanne… Sulab…O'hara..." they heard a rather forced gravely voice say, "I was sent by the uh, Mobile In-Home Couples Therapy Clinic. Is there a Miles and Stella Shortman here?"

"Yes…" Phil responded skeptically, "Hey Miles! There's a Joe Ansolabehere at the door! Says she's here to fix your marriage or something!"

"What?" Miles and Stella reacted in uniform befuddlement.

"I'll take it from here, old prune." the apparent marriage therapist insisted, "You'd better go track down that crazy granny."

"Okay, you just uh… show yourself in then, I guess…" Phil said.

Miles and Stella hadn't moved during this entire exchange just out of their sight. Finally their mystery visitor stepped into view, revealing herself to be a woman of short stature, seemingly compensating by wearing high heels that appeared to be at least two sizes too big for her feet. Similarly, her maroon business suit and skirt looked better suited for a much taller woman with a less… petite… childlike frame. Something looked familiar about her… she looked almost like Helga… but no. Helga didn't have glasses or wear her hair up in a bun.

"Ahem…" she announced herself with some force, "Good day, lady and gentleman… I'm Joanne Sulab-O'hara. I was sent by the-"

"Helga, what are you doing?" Stella asked abruptly, "There's enough roleplaying going on here already..."

Their visitor cringed, and then sighed in bitter disappointment.

"She said her name was Joanne." Miles corrected.

"Miles… it's just Helga," Stella said.

"No she isn't…" Miles insisted.

"Yes she is."

"No she isn't."

"Yes she is!"

Stella sounded increasingly annoyed, for what reason Miles wasn't quite getting.

"Oh good, good. This might be easier than I expected," Helga grinned, rubbing her hands together eagerly, "All right, all right, you got me."

Helga pulled off her glasses and undid her hair bun… which somehow just popped back into her usual static pigtailed style.

"Oh. It is you." Miles said.

"You're not… serious, are you?" Stella murmured to him.

"Sadly, yes I am…" Miles murmured back, "Growing up under this roof you just learn to go with it whenever certain people are roleplaying…"

"THE BRITISH ARE COMING!" all three of them heard Gertie shouting through the kitchen window, "THE BRITISH ARE COMING!"

"No, Pookie, that's the mailman." the voice of Phil corrected. "Hey there, Harvey."

Helga snapped her fingers and regained the attention of Miles and Stella, and their attention returned to the kitchen where they sat.

"Yep. Of all the brilliant disguises I've come up with this just had to be the one to fail." Helga shrugged. "I get it. I can't pull the wool over your eyes. You're both sharp as machetes, so I'll just give it to you straight…" Helga pulled off the rest of her disguise, revealing she had somehow fit her usual outfit beneath it.

"What's… going on?" Miles asked in confusion.

"I'm just saying it, because I'm the only one who can… I saved you both from that whole sleeping illness last summer, so I've got free reign to tell you what's on my mind, right?" Helga asked, grinning sheepishly.

"I… guess?" Stella said cautiously.

"And don't worry, Arnold's safely hiding in his room with his headphones on, I checked. He won't hear us." Helga said.

"How did you-"

"Hey, if you want to keep your life a secret, don't live under a glass roof, I say." Helga continued, "Now listen, I'm just here to offer a little constructive uh… help…"

Miles looked at Helga as if trying to decipher arcane hieroglyphics on the wall of an ancient ruin, which he had an easier time understanding than he did most people of course, but Helga in particular was a puzzle to him. She really did fit in with all the other eccentrics, kooks, misfits and freaks around the boarding house, but he was at least used to their brand of crazy. He shuttered to think of how it must have been for Arnold. Helga also had a way of speaking to them like they weren't quite adults… but then, most of the time Miles didn't quite feel like an adult, so he couldn't blame her.

"You two." Helga said, sounding like she'd been rehearsing wha she was about to say in her mind for some time, "You're… I probably don't have to tell you but you're uh, different than most parents."

Stella frowned, "Well… yes."

Helga shook her head, "No, no, I don't mean your jobs, or life in the jungle or anything like that… you're different because you two are just sort of a… perfect match."

That surprised both Miles and Stella. They looked at one another, and as they were wont to do they immediately got lost in one another's eyes.

"See what I mean?" Helga said, "It's sick…"

Stella chuckled, "Oh I know. When you're a kid this kind of affection between two people seems gross, but when you get older-"

"Oh no, no, no, no, no… I don't mean like that." Helga interrupted, "Believe me, I was already miles ahead of that curve by the time I was nine… like way ahead…"

Stella looked at Helga searchingly. Miles knew that between him and his wife, it was Stella who stood a better chance of figuring out Helga's intentions so he just decided to remain on the sidelines for the moment.

"Well then, what's the problem?" Stella asked.

"Look, I think it's great and all how lovey dovey, la la, perfect harmony you two dorks are with each other, but I just gotta say it: for the rest of us it just doesn't look natural. And I think that's making things hard on old football he- Arnold. I mean Arnold." Helga said.

Miles had no idea what to say to that. He looked at his wife who similarly appeared to be completely dumbfounded by the brazen tween girl's assertion.

"Helga… what are you talking about?" Stella finally asked.

"Trust me, I've known the kid longer than you two… technically. And believe me, he's struck out more times with more girls than-"

"Helga, what does that have to do with us?" Stella asked, sounding every bit as flabbergasted as Miles himself felt, if not slightly more annoyed.

"I'm getting there, I'm getting there!" Helga said, "Wait… actually we're there. You two? You both just sorta hit the jackpot and ended up a perfect match. Arnold and me? Well, I'll be the first to admit I'm sort of a powder keg of dynamite with a short fuse, and Arnold is uh… for all his kind-heartedness not always… attuned to uh, how girls communicate…"

"I've never understood more about what's not going on…" Miles said dully. "What are you getting at-"

"You've gotta fight." Helga said at last. "You two gotta fight with each other."

"What?" Stella gasped, "Why would you even suggest-"

"Just think about it!" Helga said eagerly, now speaking in a rapid patter, "If you two fought just a little, everyone wins! You two could focus on each other, which then gives Arnold a little breathing room, and he'd realize that you're just normal people like everybody else and stop being confused and embarrassed, and then you could all be a big happy, normal dysfunctional family and all would be well, what do you say?"

It took a moment for Miles and Stella to realize their jaws had fallen so far, they would be in danger of hitting the floor had they not been fixed to their heads. In the months they had gotten to know Helga little by little, it didn't take them long to see that she had her own way of seeing the world. This idea of hers though had to be the most insane idea they'd ever heard. Miles looked to Stella who still had her eyes locked with Helga's. As Helga grinned broadly, Stella's eyes narrowed. Miles could only imagine what she could be thinking.

"Helga." Stella said sternly as she stood up, "That is so twisted it is without a doubt… worth a try."

"It is?" Miles reacted in surprise.

"Think about it Miles… we've tried to be normal parents on our own and… we just don't know how to be." Stella admitted, "Maybe we've been going about it from the wrong angle… we've been trying to make everything too good for Arnold by being too good to be true… maybe he needs to see that we're just human beings too."

"I don't follow…" Miles scratched his head.

"Think about it, Miles." Stella said, "All Arnold ever knew about us was what your dad told him, and what he read out of that journal you kept. He probably built us up in his mind like we were… I don't know, godlike or something."

"You and me?" Helga cut in, "We are so on the same wavelength it's kinda scary…"

Stella looked at Helga and smiled.

"And how could we not trust any idea from you?" Stella smiled, "We wouldn't even be here if you weren't full of creative ideas, would we?"

Helga turned slightly pink and she smiled.

"Guilty as charged…" Helga giggled.

"After all, it was your own little heart of gold that saved every-"

"Uh huh, let's not keep recapping that…" Helga said, "Point is we're all here to help the same person: Arnold."

"That's right. We costed Arnold a normal childhood." Stella said wistfully, but then she clenched up her fist, "And we owe him just a little normalcy… so if we just show him our humanity just a little bit like this… then it'll be worth the risk."

"What risk?" Miles asked, "I'm sure our marriage can survive one little argument, after all these years."

"Perfect!" Helga grinned, "Now, we just gotta find something for you to get on each others cases about, I'll run up and grab Arnold… and then next thing you know he'll probably have your little argument settled faster than my mom can whip up a smoothie..."

"Okay…" Miles said, "Stella? You… really need to start doing your share of… dishes…"

"But I do, already." Stella said calmly, if somewhat mildly offended.

"You're right, you're right." Miles said apologetically, "What was I thinking…"

"No, no, I'm not talking trivial crap like that…" Helga groaned, "You just gotta focus on the stuff that really really bugs you about each other."

Miles looked at Stella, wondering how everything about her that bothered him could even fill a teaspoon. Still, both Helga and Stella seemed to be fully onboard with this idea, even if it sounded crazy to him he knew he could trust Stella, after all they had been through together.

"But… she's… perfect." Miles said affectionately.

"Oh, no I'm not…" Stella said sheepishly. Then she looked at Helga, "We're disagreeing… are we getting close?"

"A little too slow and steady to win this race… there's gotta be something…" Helga mused, "I mean, anything? Anything you two ever really fundamentally disagreed over?"

"Well… there was one thing…" Miles said tentatively.

Stella and Helga snapped their heads in his direction.

"It happened right around when we first met… we both… well…" Miles sighed heavily, "We both saw this cloud in the sky. I thought it looked like a schooner, but Stella thought it looked more like a clipper and… well, I guess we never really did settle on that…"

"You're right…" Stella said, "We never did… why did we never come back to that?"

"Because we… fell in love right after that." Miles said lovingly as Stella returned his adoring gaze.

"Oh criminey, the pair of you…" Helga groaned, "I'm talking the kind of stuff between you that could make your head explode with rage! Like… the way Miles is always running into stuff?"

"No, it's cute." Stella said, "Plus, I'm a doctor so-"

"Miles? C'mon… did you ever want her to… change her hair or something?"

"What's wrong with my hair?" Stella asked indignantly.

"Nothing, nothing… it was just a for instance," Helga said, "Just remember, I'm not the one you're supposed to be fighting with here."

"Sorry, you just… make it kind of easy sometimes." Stella said.

"Yeah, that's why I'm the teacher, here." Helga said, "If there's one thing I'm an expert at it's picking fights. Now, if I could just make it easy for you two. C'mon, there's gotta be something, like some kinda… I dunno, big life decision or something you couldn't see eye to eye on?"

"No, we've pretty much been on the same page about everything." Miles said, "From our decision to get married, to find the cure to the sleeping sickness, to moving back to the city after we had Arnold, to…"

Miles stopped, and he and Stella looked at one another carefully.

"… to the… choice to go back and uh… help the Green-eyed people." he said, "When Arnold was only a little guy…"

A hush fell over the kitchen as no one present quite knew how to proceed.

"What?" Stella broke the silence, "You don't actually… regret that, do you?"

"Well, no…" Miles said, "I just wish it had gone differently. Like the first time we came up with the cure… it just went better the first time."

Miles felt himself starting to perspire just slightly as he realized he may have finally found just the right sensitive subject they'd been looking for, which was the point of Helga's whole crazy exercise, but that didn't make him feel any more comfortable.

"You don't… actually think that was my fault, do you?" Stella asked cautiously. "

"Of course not!" Miles insisted.

"You're sure…?" Stella asked again, now sounding suspicious.

"No." Miles shook his head, "Not at all. We both made the same choice."

"Well, not that there was really a choice to make." Stella said.

"Yeah." Miles sighed, "I mean, ultimately yes it was our choice, but I still think we made the right one."

"What choice?" Stella asked, "We weren't going to just let a whole race of people die out."

"Right, which is what made choosing between them and Arnold was so-"

"There was no choice." Stella said somewhat defensively, "We had to do it."

"Yes, I agree…" Miles said, sounding increasingly flustered. "I just wish things had gone differently for Arnold's sake."

"Well, it couldn't have." Stella said, "Because we had no choice."

"Why do you keep saying that?" Miles asked.

"Because you seem to think it was our choice…" Stella said, "Which makes me think maybe you thought it wasn't so much our choice but just one of ours…"

"There, now you're getting it!" Helga said approvingly, "Man, I can really feel the tension building, you two are doing great. Now then, you two just keep at it and I'll go grab Arnold."

Looking sickeningly pleased with her work, Helga skipped out of the room leaving Miles and Stella looking at one another in an uncomfortable way they never had before. Miles braced himself, fearing this uncharted water more than any deep dark jungle he and Stella had ever ventured into before. At least in those days they had been allied against the dangers they faced, and Miles rightly feared being enemies with Stella more than with the likes of Lasombra.

* * *

Upstairs in his room, Arnold had been lying on his back staring up at the passing clouds in the sky through his skylight for hours, listening to the same CD on loop as he tried to just forget about all the seemingly unsolvable puzzles in his life. He had a reputation for being eternally optimistic and stubbornly committed to the people in his life, but after struggling along in his relationship with Helga for months, combined with trying to figure out how to have a life with actual parents left him feeling exhausted and vexed.

Helga had angrily sent him home last night, after he had failed to return her confession of love to him. He'd never dwelt on it before, but she had told him how much she loved him multiple times over the last year and he had never flat out said he felt the same way. The first time he really opened up to her had been during their escapade in San Lorenzo, and that had occurred just after she had saved his parents and the entire Green-eyes civilization so how could he not love her? He hadn't said that of course, he'd just kissed her, which in the moment of course had been enough.

Fast forward to the present, and after spending months with Helga trying to cover their relationship, Arnold had gone from worrying Helga was embarrassed about being with him to being flaunted around like some kind of human diamond ring on her finger, and he hadn't had time to adjust. He loved her… he thought… so why couldn't he just tell her what she wanted to hear? He had no trouble telling some of his past crushes that he liked them liked them, so why was this such a challenge now?

Arnold's eyes wandered over to the photo of his parents, which for most of his life had been the only visual he had of them outside of his imagination. The two of them just looked so impossibly happy together, he had never really realized it but as he looked back he realized that he wanted what he surmised they had. Their glowing smiles spoke only of true love, and now that he knew for a fact that they had fallen in love at first sight he just felt even more worried he would never have that with Helga.

Since he'd first met her, Helga had alternated between teasing, threatening and occasionally being… oddly helpful to him, and really not much had changed since they had entered into a relationship. He just couldn't understand how she could seem so head over heels in love with him one moment, and back to her old hateful ways in the blink of an eye… and worse, sometimes she seemed to be both ways at once.

He just wished he could attain the kind of love that his parents shared with one another. He had grown up listening to his grandpa's stories about them, and even if he had no memory of them he could always picture perfectly in his mind's eye their perfect, harmonious bond built on being so alike.

Helga… his parents… they were two separate gordian knots, so why couldn't he separate the two of them? They felt inexorably connected in his mind. Sure, Helga was more or less owed all of the credit for reuniting him with his parents, but he felt there was something more to it than that.

Arnold sighed, and then opened his dresser drawer. He pulled out another framed photo; one he kept hidden away. Looking at it he sighed sadly.

"Helga… I hope you're not too mad at me." he confided with her photo, which looked every bit as surly as she often did, "I don't know why I can't tell you what you want to hear, but I want to make things r-"

"Arnold! Arnold!" A familiar voice rang out, accompanied by a loud banging on his bedroom door.

Speak her name and she shall appear…

It was Helga alright. Of that there could be no mistake. Arnold felt his heart skip and worried his life might be in danger as he shoved Helga's picture back in his drawer. Before he could answer the door, she threw it open and burst into sight.

"Helga?" he asked in alarm.

"Oh, Arnold… come quick. You've got to do something!" she cried.

"What? What's going on?" Arnold asked.

"It's your parents… they're… they're fighting!" she wailed.

"What?" Arnold scratched his head, "They… never fight."

"Well, believe it bucko." she said, dropping her distressed tone and now sounding annoyed, "C'mon!"

Arnold had no idea what was happening, why Helga was suddenly here, or what his parents could supposedly be fighting about, but he followed her out the door as she led on. As he descended the stairs, indeed he could hear two raised voices and as he drew closer to the first floor he began to recognize them as belonging to his parents.

"Mom? Dad?" he asked as he and Helga entered the kitchen.

His parents were standing at opposite ends of the dinning table, both glaring at one another with their hands on their respective hips.

"I'm not saying I never cared about the Green-eyes!" Stella shouted, "I'm just saying if you hadn't taken Eduardo's brilliant suggestion to climb that peek, then we never would have stumbled onto them in the first place, and then life would have turned out way different!"

"Hey, one of the first things you ever told me was that you wanted to bring healthcare to everyone in the world!" Miles shot back, "Isn't that why we went back in the first place?"

"Oh, so you do blame me?" Stella asked.

"No!" Miles insisted.

"I think you do, just a little!" Stella argued. "After all, I'm just out to cure everyone and everything in the world, and that's why we left, right?"

"Oh, come on!" Miles groaned, "Now you're just putting words in my mouth…"

"Hey, they're really getting into this…" Helga murmured, "I didn't think they'd get this intense…"

"You… what?" Arnold gasped, but turned his attention back to his parents who were tearing into one another in such a way he never thought was possible. Before they could continue however, Miles and Stella snapped their attention at the two kids standing in the doorway. Locking eyes with Arnold, both adults suddenly looked like a pair of deer caught in the headlights.

"Mom… dad?" Arnold asked carefully, "What's going on?"

"Nothing…" Miles said.

"Yeah… nothing…" Stella said, "Your dad and I were just discussing some old… things. Excuse me…" Stella broke into a brisk pace as she made her way towards the door, "I have to go… pick some flowers… very violently…"

All else present watched her leave. Miles took an audibly heavy breath with his eyes closed and then exhaled for a full ten seconds or so.

"Yeah." he said, "I've gotta go… sort my… emails… or something…"

Arnold watched as his father too left the kitchen. Too shocked and perturbed to move immediately, Arnold just stood in a silent daze with Helga standing at his side scratching her chin.

"Man…" she said at last, "Bob and Miriam have their moments, but Miriam usually falls asleep halfway through their fights… that was just-"

"Helga?" Arnold asked quietly, "What did you mean by that?"

"By what?" Helga asked.

"When you said you 'didn't think they'd get this intense?'"

"What? That?" Helga laughed, "I just expected that… you know, your parents get along so well all the time that eventually they'd have to get into it and… when that finally happened they'd… oh criminey, look Arnold I just… I had an idea, okay? I get those sometimes…"

"Helga? Why were my parents shouting about-"

"Heck if I know, they came up with that on their own, I just thought… you know. You've been so upset that they're not normal enough as parents. So I had to help! That's what I do!"

"Help?" Arnold asked, "Helga, my family issues are… complicated-"

"Yeah, and complicated issues call for complicated solutions, so I figured the first step to helping them be normal parents was getting them to… fight a little. And then you'd get used to normal parents, and maybe then you'd see how normal it is for couples to fight and then maybe you'd..."

"What?" Arnold sputtered in slight disbelief, "You made them fight?"

"Well, yeah!" Helga said firmly, "It just… didn't quite pan out like I envisioned… which might have been just a little reckless and irresponsible of me but uh… hey, it's not like you date me because I'm boring, right?"

Arnold stared at Helga in complete bewilderment.

"Let me get this straight… you got them to fight to make me feel better somehow?"

"Yeah… that sounds bad when you say it like that." Helga said weakly.

"Last night you were mad that I couldn't say I…" Arnold tried to say, "And this was your solution?"

Helga couldn't even manage a response, and just smiled awkwardly.

"How was I supposed to connect those dots?" Arnold asked as close as he was capable of shouting in anger, "Helga... everything with my parents has already been weird enough without them... how could you... I just don't..."

"Arnold, please you have to believe me!" Helga pleaded, "With the benefit of hindsight, yes I now realize this may take the gold for worst idea in a long tragic history of bad ideas I've had in my life, but I did it for you! I've got so many great ideas… problem is most of them are terrible, and the only way to filter out which ones are good and which ones suck wind is to just do them and then see what happens and… and…"

Helga's lip quivered as she looked into Arnold's unflinching face. Finally she lowered her head in shame and just whimpered quietly.

"Arnold… I'm sorry…"

Arnold looked back at her, and for one of a very few times in his life he felt uncharacteristically vindictive. Helga was about the only person on earth who could bring that side out of him. She had rejected him last night, sending him away in her moment of fury, and now it was his turn. Giving in to his distinctly non-Arnold Shortman nature, he pointed to the door.

"Just go…" he said, "You've done enough… go home, Helga..."

Her head snapped back upwards and she looked at him helplessly. She opened her mouth as she always did of course, but no words came out. Squeezing her eyes shut, Helga turned around and dashed away before Arnold could see her cry.

* * *

**The End**

**…**

**Okay, obviously not, but wouldn't that just be the worst? Figured that might… soften the blow of what went down in this chapter. **

**Whew. That one took a while… the ideas I'm trying to get across in this story have started to feel a little convoluted (if not contradictory…), and this point in the story was crucial so I had to be careful. **

**Thanks for reading. Review and favorite! Or Helga will offer relationship advice...**


	6. Sweet Dreams are made of Cheese

**Reviewer Responses:**

**The JAM aka numbuh i: No help in the moment, no but... I think there's truth to what he says. **

**Haha, maybe... I don't see Miles or Stella as followers of sports.**

**Anonymous Latino: Defense mechanism... yeah... yeah that's a good way to put it. Miles was a romantic to begin with, but after what he went through he really is kind of falling back on that idealism a little too heavily. **

**I think Helga has special license to say what she wants to Arnold's parents since they more or less owe her their lives.**

**Hahaha, yes life is often just sick and twisted... that's such a Wener Herzog thing to say and I love it...**

**Glad it gave you so much to think about. And your review honestly gave me a lot to think about with angles to my own story I hadn't even seen... hmm, I now have a clearer idea of how this story could wrap up. Thank you.**

**A/N: This may be the trippiest chapter to any HA! story I've ever written... and boy was it fun to write...**

* * *

Chapter 6: Sweet Dreams Are Made of Cheese

Neither Arnold, Helga, Miles or Stella had said another word to one another for the rest of the day. All of their little worlds had been rattled by the fight, and none of them were sure of how to handle the fallout. Helga had been the most proactive in trying to handle the issues they'd all been experiencing... and that had ended in disaster so Arnold figured for the time it was best to leave it alone and try again once everyone had a chance to clear their heads.

This may have been an even worse idea than Helga's brand of couples therapy. All evening he sank deeper and deeper into his own head until he felt more paranoid than a Sid... an expression he coined to himself, in honor of his rather oversuspicious school friend.

Alone in his room, all he discomfort and paranoia just exhausted him until he felt torn between the horrible in between of being unable to sleep and unable to stay away.

His single greatest fear pertaining to his relationship with Helga had also been realized; he doubted if they could be compatible long term in the way his parents were. Of course, now having seen his parents breaking down and engaging in such a raw and intense fight had him doubting if any sort of perfect relationship on earth was obtainable, or if he'd been believing in a lie all along. His core belief that everything in the world would be okay in the end so long as his mother and father loved one another felt challenged now. Maybe true love really did only exist in fairy tales. Helga had broken that mythos that he'd clung to for so long, and he didn't know if he could ever look at her the same way again.

How could someone who claimed to love him put him through something like this?

Arnold now tossed and turned in bed as he struggled to sleep. His tormenting emotions concerning his parents and Helga refused to relinquish him from their grip however, and he suspected something in his mother's special San Lorenzo herbal tea wasn't helping either. Finally he couldn't take it anymore. He leaped out of bed fully clothed, and climbed up the steps to his skylight above. As he departed the boarding house below, he felt himself feeling strangely free, light as a feather, almost like he could walk on air… and so he did.

Stepping upwards, he left behind his problems on the ground below and soared up towards the flocks of pigeons above. He waved at them, but they all looked at him strangely. Feeling as if he didn't belong in this world, Arnold softly floated back down to the city streets below.

An atmospheric jazzy tune echoed through the night scene, adding to the melancholy mood Arnold found himself in. As he strode through the streets, the sounds of gleeful laughter in the distance mocked him. He looked up and saw a site that came up once a year: the Annual Cheese Festival, a staple of Hillwood culture for tormented lonely hearts. Like a bug drawn to a light however, Arnold just couldn't restrain himself and so he wandered into the fairgrounds.

Arnold wandered through the crowds, weaving in through what looked like an endless sea of happy couples all holding hands together. He saw his best friend Gerald walking hand in hand with Phoebe who was just staring at him with pure adoration in her eyes, and Gerald's gaze returned the very same sentiment. Those two just naturally clicked together, and in hindsight Arnold realized that the two of them had shared an obvious interest in one another since they were nine, he'd just been too preoccupied with his own feelings to notice.

Being too caught up in his own troubles to notice someone else, let alone his own best friend seemed impossible to Arnold. He tuned in and attentive to the needs the needs of others almost to a fault most of the time, so much that people occasionally wrongly labeled him as a big buttinsky for his excessive caring for the problems of others.

And yet… he'd barely even noticed that Gerald, his best friend, and Phoebe so obviously had a thing for one another all this time. It wasn't out of neglect for sure, but Arnold wondered if maybe relationships were just his big blind spot. He surveyed the scene more closely, seeing all his friends hand in hand with someone or another. He could see Harold and Patty tromping through the crowds hand in hand, crushing smaller kids under their feet as they laughed merrily. Sheena and Eugene too were holding hands, though Sheena seemed to be unintentionally dragging the boy along against his will as he looked around uncomfortably. Arnold wasn't sure what to make of that.

"All right!" Arnold heard the voice of Stinky shouting. "I actually won somethin'! Here you go, my sweet darlin'."

Arnold turned his head and observed that Stinky had just conquered the ball toss booth, having successfully won his date a prize. Stinky handed her a gigantic teddy bear, the like that Arnold himself had once failed to win his own date.

Arnold earlier felt increasingly skeptical towards the very idea of 'true love,' but now he was having his face rubbed in it by all the happy couples surrounding him.

"Maybe I'm just no good at this…" Arnold sighed sadly, "What's wrong with me? WHY CAN'T I FIND TRUE LOVE!?" He shouted in an uncharacteristically boisterous emotional outburst.

No one in the crowd even took notice of his cries, and so Arnold just moped onward in his lonely little world.

"Arnold…"

At the sound of his name, the boy spun around like a loyal dog responding to is master's call. He didn't quite recognize the mysterious voice but it felt familiar somehow.

"Arnold…" the gentle breeze of a voice called to him again.

"Who's that…?" Arnold asked.

The voice sounded so hauntingly and increasingly familiar to him. A soft, feminine tone that danced in his ears with the grace and artistry of a tender tune played on a violin.

"Are you… are you true love?" Arnold called out to the voice as he started to wander in its direction.

"Arnold…" It called to him again, "Follow me…"

Arnold ran towards the direction of the voice, weaving in and out of crowds of couples. Even as he buffeted into people clumsily, still not one of them seemed even remotely aware of his existence. Arnold ran past the bumper cars, the hot dog wagon, and some booth where Curly stood holding up a live chicken, until it brought him to a familiar carnival attraction. As he did at every year's cheese festival, Harvey the neighborhood mailman, dressed as Cupid beckoned festival goers towards a heart shaped tunnel beneath big pink words reading 'Tunnel of Love.'

"Love is blind, folks." Harvey announced in his smooth baritone voice, "Which is fitting, because you're going in blind!"

"The tunnel of love…" Arnold remarked, "Of course! Where else would true love be hiding?"

Arnold dashed towards the tunnel, which was curiously free of crowds lining up to enter, and jumped into one of the swan boats. Slowly Arnold began floating down the river into darkness, in desperate search of the one voice out there that seemed willing to acknowledge him. Arnold glanced around, desperately trying to find the source of the voice that kept calling his name, but he could barely see his own surroundings to start. He just barely could see pink hearts dotting the rocks all around him, but little else. Arnold looked downward and suddenly noticed something strange. The tunnel of love was normally just a slow moving river of water, but the water below him looked thicker than usual… and a strange hue of orange. Arnold dipped his finger in the water, and then tasted it, realizing it wasn't water at all.

"Cheese?" he remarked, "That's new this year…"

Undeterred, Arnold kept glancing around the tunnel. Glowing all around him, tacky little symbols of love from hanging colorful hearts to little cupids aiming their arrows, and not even in his direction, all seemed to taunt him. He still couldn't see the source of the the guiding voice, however it persisted calling to him.

"Arnold…" The voice sounded closer now.

Arnold looked ahead, seeing a blinding light. He'd ridden this ride exactly twice before, and it hadn't ended in a blinding light.

"Arnold…" the voice called yet again, just beyond the light.

"I'm coming!" Arnold cried out, and in his impatience he leaped from his boat into the river of liquid cheese. Just like everything else seemed to be the river's current suddenly turned against him. With all the might he could muster he stroked hard, and even against the current he wouldn't be hindered. Finally he passed through the white light and into the beyond.

"I'm here!" he cried out, abruptly finding himself standing on dry land again, and somehow not drenched in cheese.

As he looked around he realized he was still alone. The world around him was a blank, nondescript flat landscape, save for a familiar looking skylight. He realized he was right back where he'd started atop his own roof, only the city had mysteriously vanished, with only an endless night sky full of diamond studded starlight surrounding him. The sight was eerily beautiful, if not vastly infinite and somewhat forbidding, but the setting itself didn't bother him, only the crushing loneliness he felt weighing down on him.

"Hello?" Arnold called out to the vast empty void, but got no answer.

Rejected by the universe itself, the solemn boy sighed as he sat down on the cold hard ground and placed his head in his hands.

"I thought… I thought I'd find what I was looking for here…"

"Do you know what you're looking for?" the mysterious yet alluring voice suddenly reappeared.

Arnold looked up in surprise. Above him, the full moon curiously multiplied into two moons, and stared down at him like a giant pair of eyes.

"What…" Arnold rubbed his eyes, "Who are… what are you…?"

"Don't be afraid." the voice answered. The two moons morphed from pale to a blueish hue, and slowly a human face began to form around the two brilliant blue eyes in the sky.

"I am what you've been looking for…" she said, "True love; the kind that can only occur at first sight…"

Arnold stood up and gazed in awe at the sight above. The face in the sky had now fully formed, and while it looked familiar to him, but he didn't have time to process who it was before it suddenly melted into a molten stream of cheese. Arnold gasped as the river of cheese flowed out of the sky down to the roof just in front of the spot where he stood. From the ground up the cheese started to form a human figure. Beginning with saddle shoes, up to a red plaid skirt, blue sweater and distinctive head shape not unlike his own, to her chestnut hair blowing elegantly in the wind, all these features abruptly jogged Arnold's memory.

"Ruth…?" Arnold asked in disbelief, "Ruth McDougal?"

"Oh Arnold," his first real childhood crush said to him in a gentle tone, "Don't be surprised. I was and am your first and only true love."

"You…" Arnold suddenly felt himself transported back to the forth grade, and he recalled first setting eyes on this supposedly divine creature; the first time she smiled in his direction from across the hallway, casting a spell on him that doomed him to pine for her for most of his fourth grade year. Now a sixth grader himself, fourth grade felt like a lifetime ago to Arnold.

"So… you… you're the one meant for me?" Arnold asked in pure disbelief, sounding surprised by his own words, "It was really _you_ all along?"

"Of course." Ruth said tenderly, "You wanted love at first sight, and that's exactly who I was to you."

Arnold closed his eyes as a painful rush of conflicting emotions washed over him. To his younger self, this was wish fulfillment at its finest most pure form. The seemingly impossible unobtainable sixth grade girl he'd once loved from afar… finally accepted him. Sure, he recalled that she'd once completely stomped all over his heart, when she revealed she was vapid, self absorbed with all the emotional depth of a small puddle… but maybe things had now changed? Maybe that didn't matter because he really had fallen in love with Ruth the very first time he saw her, and he had known that they were perfect for each other, and now all was forgiven? Maybe?

"You're… you're really my true love?" Arnold asked again, his eyes still shut tight.

"Yes Alfred, I really am." Ruth answered.

Arnold didn't have time to dwell on how she'd gotten his name wrong, as more alarmingly her voice sounded drastically different all of a sudden.

"You can be just ever so sure of that. I love you just oh so much…"

Arnold opened his eyes and snapped his head back in Ruth's direction… only to see not Ruth but someone else entirely. A girl in a green dress with auburn braids framing her friendly freckled face now smiled at him.

"Lila?" Arnold gasped, "What… where'd Ruth go?"

"Ruth?" Lila asked.

"Yeah… she's my… true love? I think?" Arnold said with little confidence.

"I'm just ever so sure I have oh so little idea of what you could mean." Lila answered, speaking in a coy windup doll tone of voice, "What matters is that we're finally alone together, just you and me. Oh Arnold, have you forgotten all the time that you wistfully pined away for this day? The day that I would like you like you the way you like me like me?"

"I…" Arnold stumbled, "I had forgotten, actually… but now that you mention it..."

Arnold now thought back to the period of time he'd spent wishing Lila would date him. Unlike Ruth, Arnold actually had the foundation of a friendship with Lila to start with, which just made him all the more frustrated with his inability to get even a glimmer of hope that she felt the same way about him. Arnold knew Lila well, and she wasn't vapid and shallow like Ruth but sweet and fun loving… even if she had a very different view on bumper cars, horror movies, or much of anything else that Arnold enjoyed.

"Come now Arnold, you and I get along so well, and have just ever so much in common. Surely that's the mark of true love." Lila said.

"I guess that makes sense…" Arnold said dully, "Does that mean you and me are really meant to be togeth-"

"No." Lila shook her head, and fixed him with a stern look. "We're not. And we never will be."

"What?" Arnold sputtered, completely blindsided and flabbergasted by Lila's sudden change of tune. "But you were just saying we-"

"Oh Arnold, still so naive about love…" Lila's innocently warm and friendly expression vanished without warning, and pure malice crossed her once sunny face. Even more disturbingly, her voice had suddenly deepened… not to the depth of say the deep voiced mailman Harvey, but to another familiar female voice that made Arnold's skin crawl.

"You're not… who are you?" Arnold recoiled.

"Why, I'm love at first sight, Arnold… that is what you want, right?" she hissed.

"I thought so, but this is getting kinda…"

"Beware of love at first sight, Arnold… it might look inviting enough a first but before you know it… it might turn into something nasty..." Lila hissed in a voice that wasn't hers, and suddenly Lila was no longer Lila. She grew a few inches taller, her pale skin darkened to a shade of tan and her auburn hair turned platinum blonde. Despite her still objectively attractive appearance, she filled Arnold with an unspoken dread.

"Summer!?" Arnold cried out in terror.

Summer, a girl who had once cruelly toyed with Arnold's emotions in order to manipulate him into winning a contest for her, with the intention of blowing him off once she got wha she wanted now stood before him. Arnold didn't recall her having such pointy razor sharp teeth, nails, and catlike eyes before, but they really suited her true personality. As she lunged forward, Arnold shielded himself and closed his eyes. Expecting to be mauled, Arnold instead heard Summer let out a piercing shriek the like of a banshee… and everything fell silent.

Cautiously, Arnold opened his eyes once again, and saw another girl standing before him, with her back turned to him. She stood in a fighting stance, and had evidently just warded off the attacking demonic Summer. At her feet rested a pool of melted cheese, which Arnold surmised Summer had just melted into. Or Lila… or Ruth… or whoever or whatever entity that thing claiming to be 'True Love' had been.

"You really attract the crazies, Arnold. And I know that better than anyone..." the girl panted, "Looking out for you is a full time job, I swear…"

She finally turned to face him. That pink jumpsuit she wore struck him as familiar… and the pink scrunchy holding her blonde hair up in a high ponytail. Her face looked even more familiar to him, and as he looked into her eyes he recognized her at last. She was a country girl who lived in his cousin Arnie's town, and one he'd felt even more clear strong feelings for than any of his earlier crushes.

"So... you're my true love? You were love at first sight?" Arnold asked carefully, "Hilda?"

"Hilda. Sure. Whatever you say, Arnold." Hilda nodded, "So, have we learned anything from this?"

"That I shouldn't drink that weird herbal tea that mom makes before bed…" Arnold said as he rubbed his temples.

"No, about your idea of love at first sight?" Hilda corrected.

"I thought so for a moment… but I don't understand… I fell in love with you at first sight too." Arnold said. "You're not gonna turn demonic too, are you?"

"Nah. Not this time. And you didn't fall in love with me 'at first sight.'" Hilda shook her head. "Falling in love took time with me."

"Pretty sure it didn't…" Arnold insisted, "I saw you and right away my heart just… you were just perfect… completely unlike any girl I'd ever met before-"

"You didn't fall in love with me the first time you saw me because…" Hilda giggled, "Well, because you _had_ seen me before."

"I saw you… before the first time I ever saw you?" Arnold asked, "How is that even possible…?"

"Oh, I think we're beyond the point of coyness." Hilda said, "You know who I really am, Arnold..."

"No..." Arnold said unconvincingly, as if trying to hide something. Then he remembered something else.

"But, I thought you liked... Arnie, my cousin?"

Hilda shrugged.

"Oh, that was just so you'd know how it felt..." she smiled, "... to see the one you love ignore you for someone else. Arnold? You know in your heart who I... what I am. I'm an avatar for the girl you really had deep feelings for. One you were always hyper aware of for some strange reason, even if she was annoying or just plain mean. One you're always bumping into. One whose voice you could hear from miles away when no one else could. One you were always concerned for, and thought might be a nice person even if she refused to show it. You always had these feelings, Arnold. You just didn't understand them yet, because real love was too big a concept for a football head to handle. And you just didn't want to admit it to yourself, so you dreamt me up instead."

"That's… really confusing…" Arnold said.

"No it's not." Hilda laughed, "You know what I mean in your heart, your brain is just struggling to catch up. You've known how you really feel in your heart of hearts. Ever since that Valentines Day, two years ago."

Arnold looked Hilda over. Her appearance had seamlessly changed without him noticing. Now she wore a skirt with a pink striped blouse, and her hair flowed down in elegant wavy curls.

"I know, Cecile…" Arnold sighed, not even wondering why he'd suddenly started calling Hilda Cecile, "You just… you mean so much to me... it's hard to express it in words…"

"I know." Cecile sighed happily "And… we've shown you how much we love you. And you've shown how much you love her."

"Who?" Arnold asked.

Suddenly both Cecile and Hilda stood side by side. They looked at one another and groaned in frustration.

"HER." they both said forcibly, "Your soul mate! Your other half! The one that you know would move mountains for you if she could!"

"She's shown you that she loves you." Hilda said.

"That's what speaks loudest." Cecile agreed.

"And falling in love with her wasn't just instant." they both said, "It took time. It took trial and error… but it persisted. Because it was worth it. And that made it more powerful than any big stupid like you like you crush you've had before."

Arnold let the words of Hilda… or Cecile or whoever she was take time to sink in. As he began to digest everything she… or they or whatever had just dumped on him, finally at long last something started to click in his mind. Almost anyway. He still had one hangup.

"But.. what about my mom and dad?" He asked.

Hilda and Cecile, who were now somehow two separate people again, turned livid.

"AGAIN with your parents!?" they groaned in unison, "Can we EVER talk about ANYTHING else!?"

Arnold remained calm as he proceeded to explain.

"I just… I wanted what they have... or what I thought they had until today." Arnold explained, "They just have this perfect, natural symbiotic thing going. I mean, as parents they're… um, well they're figuring all that out but as a couple? They're just perfect... or at least I thought they were. I just don't understand, if what they had was true love, then why doesn't it feel like that for me?"

Hilda nodded in understanding. But then she cocked her eyebrow and smiled wryly.

"What's that thing your dad keeps saying? That he's the luckiest guy in the world?" she asked.

"He does tend to say that…" Arnold noted. "So wait... he just got lucky?"

"So to speak..." Hilda snickered.

"Well, there's your proof positive." Cecile nodded, "True love is different for everybody. He just lucked out and happened to hit bullseye. Couples like that are rare... and they infuriate the rest of us, but... well, there they are. They exist."

"Oh… I guess that makes sense." Arnold said, feeling slightly disappointed but also somehow comforted by that knowledge.

"I guess you're probably a little worried about them now, huh?" Hilda asked.

"Yeah... they've never really fought like _that_ before." Arnold said.

"How do you know?" Hilda challenged him.

"I've never seen them fight... and they pretty much spend all their time following me around now that they're home." Arnold said, "And in my dad's journal he never mentioned them having any relationship issues. I mean... there was that one time he said mom was yelling 'unspeakable curses' and looking like something out of 'The Exorcist.' But even that wasn't really them fighting... he said he thought it was h-"

"Arnold. You really think he wrote down everything that happened?" Hilda asked, "A lot of this has to be down to your interpretation."

"Maybe..." Arnold admitted, "But I don't know if they can come back from-"

"Arnold? Let me give it to you straight." Hilda said firmly, "Couples argue. Couples fight. That's just what happens when you have two human beings with their own points of view in constant contact. Sooner or later they're gonna contrast. It even happens with the 'perfect' ones. The mark of a healthy relationship isn't a total lack of fighting, it's being able to fight with the ones you love, cool down, acknowledge it, learn from it, reconcile and move forward. Kinda like you and a certain funny, beautiful, and talented someone... you two are actually getting really good at it."

Arnold looked at Hilda and Cecile in silence as they just looked back at him with loving eyes. Her words exuded an unexpected wisdom. He knew now in his mind what his heart had known for a long time. These mysterious faces that had haunted him before in truth belonged to someone else in his life. Admitting he loved her to himself was already such an earth shattering revelation that he was still processing it every day since. Arnold closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He felt ready, at last. When he opened his eyes, only Hilda remained, wearing Cecile's outfit… or perhaps it was Cecile with her hair up the way Hilda wore it- whatever. They were one and the same.

Regardless, he knew who they really were; in his heart he'd always known, but now his mind had finally caught up.

"I… I think I can say it now." Arnold took another deep breath as he looked at her, "I lo-"

"Save it." Hilda/Cecile cut him off.

"What? But I thought you wanted me to say-" Arnold tried to say.

"Say it to the real deal when you're awake." she instructed.

"When I'm awake?"

"Uh, doi… how have you not figured out that this is a dream yet?"

"Well, because then it would just be over, and I was starting to enjoy being with y-" Arnold began, but the world abruptly faded to darkness around him… and slowly he found himself lying in bed again. He felt completely shaken, but not perturbed by everything he'd just gone through in dreamland. On the contrary, he felt enlightened after a long hard battle with his subconscious feelings. Despite his heart pounding to the point where he could hear it, he smiled peacefully and drifted back to sleep, knowing now how he was going to face the next day.

The next day; that was a ways off. Arnold's eyes shot open as he realized he had spurned Helga. He'd rejected her and left her out in the cold... now that his anger had faded he suddenly feared for her safety. This was Helga after all, and heaven knew what she'd do as a result of him sending her away in his anger. He knew how important he was to her, and now... for the first time he finally felt as if maybe she was equally important to him. He was so important to her that she had gone to long crazy lengths to keep a close eye on him for much of their young lives, and for the first time ever he wanted to do the same for her.

His imagination went to the worst places, and suddenly more afraid for her than anything, Arnold tore off his covers and without even throwing on his clothes he climbed up out of his room through the skylight, ran down the fire escape and bolted off towards Big Bob's Beepers dressed only in his pajamas.

* * *

_**Hope that was more fun and illuminating than it was confusing! It all makes perfect sense to me... but then a Neil Breen movie probably makes perfect sense to Neil Breen so...**_

_**I was originally going to include Arnold's other sixth grade crush Mary Margaret from the book 'Arnold's E-Files' but decided nah... that was basically the same story with Ruth again; a stuck up older girl who didn't even realize he existed.**_

_**One of my favorite hidden easter eggs in TJM and The Journal is what's written on some of the pages of Miles's journal that you can only read if you pause... the page before they realize Stella is pregnant there's this crazy description where Miles details that she's angry, yelling unspeakable curses, and looking like something out of the Exorcist, but he finds it hot... and then later it reads how he hopes they have a son, name him Arnold, and have a TV show about him that lasts a hundred episodes... **_

_**Eherm, anyway. Remember to favorite and review! Or a demonic Ruth/Lila/Summer made of cheese will attack you in your sleep... just realizing how strange that sounds...**_


	7. Chosen One

**Reviewer Responses**

**Anonymous Latino: Indeed, how could he not love her? Well… theirs is very much a love/hate relationship so there's that… but yeah, actions speak louder than words and as mean as Helga can be, her actions show who she really is and Arnold sees that.**

**Kryten: I'm trying. At first I thought the upside to this quarantine thingy would be that I'd have time to work on writing, and similarly others would too but man… I struggle with writer's block on a normal basis but this? This feels truly debilitating at times… still, glad my updates are helping in some small way. **

**Yeah, even as a kid I kind of figured that was the true purpose of Arnold Visits Arnie, to show in a clever subtle way that Arnold does have feelings for her too, he just doesn't fully realize it yet. Of course… I realized that without really realizing it at the time because I too was a dumb kid trying to figure stuff out… just like Arnold. How meta… **

**Veganmama: Wish granted. Here you go!**

**A/N: Well, I apologize… this chapter may be even trippier than the last… this quarantine has apparently finally driven me completely cuckoo. I wasn't far from the finish line before but, man...**

* * *

Chapter 7: The Chosen One

"If there's one thing I'm good at it's picking fights…" Helga muttered to herself, "If there's another thing I'm good at it's making a bad situation exponentially worse…"

Helga lay in her sleeping bag, and staring upwards while wishing her room had a skylight like Arnold's. Or at least a window. Heck, she'd settle for a hole in the wall that at least connected to the outside world in some small stupid way. It was pitch dark in the beeper store closet that she called a room these days, and while she'd gotten used to these sleeping conditions on a normal day, the darkness of night wasn't helping in her futile efforts to fall asleep.

Sleep felt impossible in the wake of her escapades earlier, wherein she may have had one of her schemes backfire more spectacularly than anything in her history of crazy schemes. She couldn't even stand and defend herself to Arnold when he'd rebuffed her, not when she knew that she had gone too far this time.

Of course, even after convincing the boy's parents to fight with one another Helga hadn't even run out of bad ideas yet. When she had returned home earlier, she felt desperate for some control over the situation she'd lost control over. At the time in her emotionally compromised state she couldn't think of anything rational, so she turned to the pseudo religious borderline occult practices she fell back on in her overly emotional tizzies. She'd taken a few precautions by chanting and dancing before her shrine to Arnold, and when that didn't seem like enough she went as far as making burnt offerings before it.

Those burnt offerings then triggered the smoke detectors, the smoke detectors triggered the sprinklers… and the sprinklers triggered the wrath of the Beeper King.

A loud scolding from her father was usually the best she could hope for in terms of any sort of parental attention most of the time, so at least having his store soaked served as a reminder to him that she existed. That wasn't much consolation for the dilemma she still faced with Arnold and his family.

Back in the present, Helga reflected on the day's toll, and how and if she might somehow be able to mitigate it.

"Well, let's weigh the situation here… I may have finally irreparably sabotaged this already delicate relationship with Arnold… but on the positive side in the extremely off chance that this all somehow works out for the best, and Arnold comes around and forgives me... then we'll have worked through probably the worst case scenario possible for a couple our age and- oh, why can't I ever just think with my head and not with my heart? I mean… I've got a better functioning brain than most people in school, so why can't I ever just use it!?"

Helga pulled out her heart locket, which somehow lit up the entire room with its warm ethereal glow.

"I've always followed my heart… and about every one out of five times it sends me down the right path…"

Helga stared at Arnold's glowing picture and frowned at it. She hadn't painted the thing with phosphorus or anything, so the glow was strange… maybe the thing really had absorbed the mystical power of the Corazon back in San Lorenzo.

"Oh Arnold…" she fawned, "I love you so much I could just eat you up…"

She glanced over at her shrine. The large watermelon slice depicting Arnold's head now had several bites taken out of it.

"Forgive me… there's so little food in the house. Hunger drove me to this blasphemy. Arnold my little demigod, mayhap I wanted to possess just some of your divinity? No… no, I was just hungry. Oh Arnold, I know that you've forgiven me for so very… very, very, very… very very VERY many things that I've done to you in our little lives, but mayhap this time I have crossed over a threshold too far for you to follow? Twas too arrogant of me to think that I could once again meddle with the laws of nature, and seize control over something as wild and untamed as your parents' very lives! I acted with only the best of intentions and the worst of ideas. Dare I even ask for your forgiveness? Hath I at last used up the last drops of your infinite sweet mercy?

Arnold's picture of course said nothing in return.

"Well, say something!" she demanded, shaking the locket violently.

"Just leave me alone…" the picture of Arnold sighed. Then it turned around and walked out of sight, leaving just a golden heart framing a picture of nothing.

"Hey!" Helga shook her locket up and down, hoping a tiny Arnold would fall out of it, "Come back! Did I say you could just walk out on me, bucko?"

Suddenly her locket freed itself from her grasp and began floating away.

"Oh no, don't you walk out on me too!" Helga growled, "You're all I've got left!"

She jumped up and grabbed the floating locket with both hands, and the next thing she knew she felt herself being dragged upwards as the little affect rocketed off into the abyss. Helga screamed as stars flashed by her, as her locket pulled her along through space. She held on with all her might as if trying desperately to stand up as if she were trying to waterski, but was only being dragged along at the bottom of a deep dark lake.

"What rabbit hole am I being dragged down this time?" she asked herself.

She looked around and saw all sorts of strange familiar images flashing by. Moments from her past, both real and the kind she had only dreamt of. She saw herself meeting Arnold for the first time, fawning over him, tripping him and shoving him through the halls of school, tenderly kissing him, rebuking and mocking him some more…

"Man… no wonder they sent me to therapy…" she remarked.

She could see an image of herself adorned in a bridal dress, standing before the alter with Arnold smiling lovingly at her. Seeing this, she abruptly let go of the locket which shot off into darkness, leaving her floating before the vision of her wedding day that she so coveted.

Helga reached out towards the image of herself passionately proclaiming, "I do, I do! I do!"

And as she reached towards that vision suddenly it shattered like glass and the shards all collapsed around her.

"No!" she gasped, "No, no, no… what did I do? Was I impatient? Have I tried to force this happy ending into this story of our lives that I continue to write every day? Is it too much for a girl my age to want to get married?"

She let her own question sink in for a moment.

"Okay… obviously, yes." she sighed, but then fell to her knees… or at least she tried to, but was still floating through space so she just couldn't do that. She looked around at the bleak blackness surrounding her. Her locket had gone, and Arnold with it. Now she couldn't even see any of the blissful fantasies that got her through her normally abysmal daily life. She couldn't even move. She'd felt this inscrutable feeling before, but now for the first time she could see and feel it clearly.

"Man, this feels like the worst kind of writer's block ever…" she groaned.

As she looked off into space, she could see faces of great writers looking back at her; William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Agatha Caulfield all shook their heads disapprovingly before vanishing.

"Aw who needs you anyway you weasels!" Helga shook her fist at them, "Oh… creative juices gone… all hope fading… I must continue this story but I don't know how. What would Ernest Hemingway do?"

She paused in thought.

"I'd better not do that… but still, I've lost control of… everything. My muse, my inspiration, my torment… it's all gone. Now there's nothing but this empty void..."

"Okay, I think I've got it this time…" a familiar voice appeared.

Helga turned and saw her teacher Mr. Simmons floating in her direction. The man's eyes were fixed to a blackboard as he apparently struggled to understand what he was writing on it.

"X equals… plus or minus… equals the… square root of…" the man sounded mentally exhausted as he pressed on with the lesson he so desperately wanted to teach to his students.

"Simmons?" Helga asked, "What are you doing here?"

"Not now Helga," he said as he floated by, "I'm going to figure this out… and when I do I can be a better teacher to you kids… you deserve that…"

"Poor deluded fool…" Helga sighed, but then her eyes went wide, "Wait… that's it! There's gotta be some kinda equation or formula for how a healthy relationship works! Hey, Simmons come back!"

"Oh, there's no equation for love, Helga." Simmons called back to her, "But it does take a lot of work and practice every day, just like your schoolwork."

"What the heck kind of lame advice is that!?" Helga shouted after him.

"I'm your teacher, not your therapist." he called back as he vanished into the void.

Helga groaned as she found herself completely alone in the vast dark universe yet again. The loneliness didn't last.

"Aaaaarnold…?" another girl's voice in the distance called.

Helga snapped her head in its direction and saw Rhonda, elegantly and effortlessly soaring through space as she called out Arnold's name.

"Rhonda!" Helga hissed, "I see. Just joining the pantheon of rivals for Arnold's affection? Hey, I beat Ruth, I beat Lila, and I'll beat you too…"

"Ruth was never going to happen and Lila's dirt poor. You've never had a rival with… means." Rhonda smiled fiendishly as dollar bills spilled from her pockets and flurried around the two of them, "Look at yourself. What are you worth, Helga? Arnold could do way better… and there's nothing you can do to stop me."

Helga flet her lip quiver. Rhonda's words stung her, but rather than breaking down into hysterical sobbing Helga suddenly she felt a rush of excitement as if feeling challenged. Rather than breaking her, Rhonda had awoken Helga's competitive nature and now she was going to suffer for it.

"If you're so sure of that, why don't we find out for ourselves?" Helga asked with a devious grin.

"What now?" Rhonda scoffed at her.

"Seriously, if you're so sure that your good looks, charm and pocket book are gonna win Arnold over… and also apparently you can fly… seriously how are you doing that?"

"You can do pretty much anything when you're as rich as me." Rhonda chided as she twirled through space.

"Alright, then why don't you just take me with you and we'll find out who Arnold prefers together?" Helga challenged.

Rhonda looked back at her with narrowed eyes.

"Alright, challenge accepted." Rhonda nodded, and stretched forth her hand. "Let's go see the football-headed love god himself…"

Helga grabbed Rhonda's wrist and in a flash the two of them warped into a tunnel of stars flashing by them. Helga could feel her eyelids and lips flapping in the wind as they raced forward, with all the stars turning into a line of psychedelic lights all around them until everything turned into a flash of brilliant white light.

"Too bad that didn't kill me… where are we?" Helga groaned as she slowly came to. When she looked up she saw Rhonda standing before a giant stone alter, surrounded by jungle foliage. She had seen this sight before.

"The… Green-eyes hidden city?" Helga murmured, and as she took in the familiar huge circular stone city.

"Hidden City Land." Rhonda affirmed.

"They really built this place up since last time…" Helga remarked, referring specifically to two giant stone statues at the center of the city. Helga blinked in disbelief when she recognized them.

"Of course, Miles and Stella get their own statues…" she huffed, but then at the very center of the temple, where there had once been a dome roof now hosted a new football-headed statue with its hands stretched skyward.

"And him. The chosen one himself. That goes without saying… those Shortmans really are gods among men," she groaned, but then she saw some small golden glowing object in the sky floating just above Arnold's stone hands. Helga squinted her eyes as she tried to make out what it was.

"The… Corazon?" she asked.

"Yes…" Rhonda said manically as she headed up the stone stairs towards Arnold's statue, "And now it will select who's worthy of joining Arnold in his godhood…"

Helga looked up at the statue, and into the blank stone eyes looking down at her dispassionately. The sculptor really captured Arnold's vacant aloof expression, she had to admit… but she didn't have time to dwell on that. She had to rise to the challenge and prove to him she was better for him than Rhonda.

"Arnold, please!" Helga cried out to his statue, "I know I may be naught but a lowly worm before your magnificence, but I prithee see into my heart! For it is worth more than all the… gold in…"

Helga sank down to her knees and she lowered her head.

"I can't even pretend…" she sighed, "I'm not worthy of your love, my football-headed love god… I know that now. I'm just a destructive hot mess… dangerous to myself and everyone around me."

And then Helga finally felt her eternal flame that had burned in her since the moment she first laid eyes on Arnold whimper, and then slowly go out. As tears fell like rain from her eyes, similarly water began to fall from the sky and spatter all over her.

"I'm not a god." a gentle voice said.

Helga opened her eyes and saw a hand being offered to her. Helga looked up and felt heart overflow with emotion when she saw who the hand belonged to; not a radiant godlike entity, but just a familiar kind-faced boy holding an umbrella and offering her shelter from the rain.

"Arnold?" Helga gasped. "But I thought you were… that!"

She gestured towards Arnold's statue, which just prompted the boy to shake his head.

"That's not me." he said, "That's what you've built me up as in your mind. I'm just a kid, Helga. Not a god, not superhuman, I'm just… me."

"But you… your family… you're weird as all get out but you're still just perfect!" Helga insisted. "I can never live up to your standards!"

"Am I the one with the high standards?" Arnold asked, "Or is that you?"

"Kind of leading question, hair boy…" Helga muttered, but then she thought back over the last few days, weeks and months. She had been fantasizing more than usual, all about an idealized fantastical world where everything in her world was beyond perfect. She remembered the opera she'd dreamt up; foretelling her marriage to Arnold in the most over the top way imaginable, and later their mundane walk through the city streets she imagined as an epic adventure through some medieval romance novel. The more she thought about what she wanted out of life, the more she started to realize… she was really expecting a lot from Arnold. Ever since she'd first met him she had been waiting for him to sweep her off her feet and whisk her away from the abysmal mess she called her life.

"Helga. I'm just a nice guy who did a nice thing for you once." Arnold said.

As he held his umbrella over her she recalled that first moment she had fallen hard for him when he had offered her this same gesture.

"But that was… everything to me." Helga said softly.

"I know." Arnold smiled, "And you're not wrong to feel the way you do about me, but you have to remember that I'm not a god… or a 'football-headed love god.'"

"You stopped a volcanic eruption just by virtue of being born and saved an entire civilization…" Helga muttered.

Arnold blinked.

"I think that was just a coincidence…" Arnold said with an awkward smile.

"And then you saved them again from the sleeping sickness ten years later, 'chosen one'…" Helga pressed.

"But I didn't." Arnold shook his head, "YOU did. You led us here. You saved us from Lasombra, and YOU with a heart of gold saved the green-eyes... and my parents. You're worthy, Helga. You always have been."

Helga reflected on all that. She really hadn't given herself enough credit.

"So then… that means…" Helga struggled to put words together.

"Yes." Arnold said with open arms and a broad smile.

"… that I'M a god too!" Helga blurted. Her eyes burned with megalomaniacal ambition as she clenched her fists in triumph. "The world is mine to bring to heel at last! All shall bow before the might and and the power and glory of Helga G.-"

"No!" Arnold recoiled in fear, "No, that's not what I meant… I meant more that… that…"

"That what?" Helga asked, "Just spit it out."

"That you're the chosen one." Arnold said, "You're… my chosen one."

"You… chose me?" Helga asked.

"Well… not really." Arnold said, "Between you and any other girl in my life? There was no choice. It's like you and I were just shipped from the beginning by whatever great writer in the sky writes our story, making us..."

"Soul mates…" Helga sighed contentedly, but then she sighed as something still didn't feel right.

"What's wrong, Helga?" Arnold asked.

"If we're soul mates, then why is everything about us so… hard?" Helga asked, "I thought soul mates were supposed to just click. That's how it usually goes in most stories. Why can't our story just be perfect? I thought I'd gotten the happy ending I deserved when you finally kissed me last summer..."

Arnold shrugged, "I guess because… this isn't a story. This is just life. If that was your happy ending then things would have just stopped. Life doesn't end until it... you know… ends."

Helga shuddered, but then Arnold smiled to her reassuringly. Stepping towards her, he held out his hand.

"Or who knows… maybe in some way our life is all a big story." Arnold conceded. "If that's how you want to look at it."

"It is. And it's one that we're both writing together every day." Helga said. "And I'm done with forcing things to happen. I'm going to let things grow organically. That's how good storytelling works."

"I'm not ready for this to just be the ending." Arnold said, "Even if it's a happy one, I want to spend more time with you. A lot more time. It might not be perfect, but we'll be together."

Helga clasped her hands together as Arnold's words made her feel as if she could just melt where she stood. But once again she felt an inexplicable sense of reservation, prompting her to cross her arms and turn away.

"Just one thing… how do I know that you really love me when you won't even say it?" she asked.

"Because I don't need to." Arnold answered with uncharacteristic smugness in his tone.

Taken aback by his answer, Helga snapped her head back in his direction and looked at him aghast.

"Because you already know I do." he said, "You're a writer. You're a storyteller. What's the first rule of good writing?"

"Hate yourself?" Helga asked.

"No, the other one…"

"Show don't tell?"

Arnold nodded, and all at once everything abruptly made so much sense to Helga it almost hurt. Arnold didn't need to tell her he loved her; he had shown her how much he loved her. Images began flashing through Helga's memory. She could see all the instances throughout her life when Arnold had noticed her when no one else had; all those times he had offered her a listening ear and a helping hand, and inspired her to be her best self. He really had always been able to see through the mean and nasty fog she shrouded herself in, and seen her true self behind it all.

"Oh… who else could know me so well in their heart to be my soulmate?" Helga asked rhetorically, "Phoebe…? No… no it has to be you, Arnold…"

Her impossibly perfect boyfriend smiled at her and offered her his hand and now she eagerly accepted it.

"Then let our story continue from here to eternity. Oh Arnold, my muse, my inspiration, my… everything… I was trapped in a dark void that I can only compare to writer's block, but my locket guided me here to you… though I guess I had a little help from… from..."

A haunting worry suddenly reemerged in Helga's mind, and she turned her head as she abruptly remembered they weren't alone.

"I win, princess." Helga announced proudly to her latest rival for Arnold's affection.

Rhonda had been suspiciously quiet all this time to the point Helga had nearly forgotten she was even there. To Helga's further surprise the girl just looked back at her with passive disinterest.

"Oh please, I'm not even into Arnold like that." Rhonda huffed.

"Yes you are!" Helga shouted back. "You keep butting in on our business and gossiping about us!"

"And that's… unusual for me?" Rhonda asked sardonically.

"Point taken…" Helga huffed.

"Yeah, I've been shipping you two since the fourth grade." Rhonda pulled out her old patented origami wedding predictor, which had once foretold Helga's eventual marriage to Arnold. "Of course I want all the juicy details, but that's just because I'm a consummate gossip." Rhonda paused and then said with pride, "And I own that. You're just paranoid because you're used to having someone always be your rival for his affections. Now you're just projecting all that on me."

"Hey, that's… wow… that's probably true." Helga pondered, and it occurred to her that none of her past rivals had ever even really been interested in Arnold to begin with. She only hated them because he had liked them. She struggled to think of anything she had against Lila on a personal level, apart from being generally annoying.

She looked back at Rhonda, who was now inexplicably standing alongside Ruth, Lila and Summer. Helga smirked.

"So… I don't get to see you and the others get melted by the Corazon?" Helga asked.

"That seems kind of childishly destructive and negative…" Lila said.

"Oh fine. It's your dream." Rhonda sighed, "No harm no foul. Just remember, we're not actually us. We're just dreamlike personifications of all your insecurities-"

"DON'T LOOK AT IT ARNOLD! KEEP YOUR EYES SHUT!" Helga shouted overly dramatically as the air around them began to swirl, as if a storm was gathering.

The mystical Corazon hovering above them floated downward and illuminated as the others stared into its mesmerizingly unearthly beauty. Helga and Arnold closed their eyes and held one another tightly. Even with their eyes closed they could see flashes of light followed by rolls of thunder all around them. With her eyes shut tightly, Helga smirked as she heard the other girls' sounds of adoration and awe turn to cries of terror. They could feel the heat of the beams of energy emitting from the Corazon all around them, but they dared not look at it. Finally the cries of Ruth, Lila, Summer and Rhonda fell quiet, and calm returned to the world around them. Slowly, Helga at last opened her eyes and found that she and Arnold were alone again. The world around them had turned solid white like an empty page of paper, just begging for her to write out more of their life story together on it.

"Huh." Arnold said flatly, still taking in what had just happened, "You know, when my said it was too sacred to look at I figured it could do something more like that than just spitting darts…"

"Ah, that was the original Corazon." Helga said, "Mine is better."

Arnold looked downward and saw Helga's locket lying on the ground. Cautiously he picked it up and offered it back to its owner. Helga looked at the little heart she clasped in her hands and smiled.

"You're uh… scary sometimes." Arnold said slightly timidly.

Helga leaned in close to him and smiled confidently.

"You like me because I'm scary." she said, "There aren't enough scary people in your life…"

"I happen to like nice girls." Arnold said.

"I'm a nice girl." Helga said as she leaned in even closer.

"No you're not, you're-"

Arnold didn't have a chance to finish his sentence as Helga's lips closed in around his, locking him in a kiss. Lost in her bliss Helga slowly started to realize her kiss with Arnold had turned into something else… it was still a kiss, but Arnold's lips felt somehow more dry and fabric like than before.

When her eyes opened she found herself locking lips with her pillow.

"It was all a dream…" Helga sighed, "I mean, that was obvious but I didn't want it to end… now I'm back in a world alone without… Arnold."

Without even thinking, she stood up and made for the door. As if compelled by forces beyond her understanding, she knew she had to find Arnold now and couldn't wait until morning. It wouldn't be the first time she had appeared at his house in the middle of the night, but this time it felt more necessary than ever before.

As she passed through the glass doors of the beeper store however she found her journey across the city to Arnold's house come to an unexpected and abrupt end. Approaching from the parking lot in her direction she could just see a familiar face.

"Arnold?" she asked.

* * *

**Okay. No more dream sequences. One more and this story might explode…**

**Much like one of those girls' heads probably exploded in Helga's dream when it went all Raiders of the Lost Ark there... heh... guess Curly's not the only one we should be worried about.**

**Thank you for reading and be sure to favorite and review! Or Arnold's gonna dump Helga for real...**


	8. I Something You

_**Reviewer Responses:**_

_**The JAM aka Numbuh i: A combination of indigestion, attack of conscience and… true love? I dunno… they all usually feel the same to me. XD**_

_**Kryten: Love Goddess? Did I say love goddess? I hope not… I was just thinking more of her megalomania kicking in and wanting to elevate herself to the divinity she sees Arnold as… oh god what have I done…**_

_**Veganmama: I get writer's block a lot and this COVID19 thing is not helping the creative process quite like I hoped it would. **_

_**The first rule of good writing is hate yourself, the second rule is drink, the third rule is keep going in that vein… couldn't bring myself to make Helga say rule 2… not at her age… **_

_**Anonymous Latino: Every single epiphany related to love and relationships is soon forgotten in my experience… I mean, even Buddhists say that enlightenment is temporary and doesn't last.**_

_**HAFanforever: Hehe, I made the Raiders reference pretty overt but I figured only diehards would catch the Han and Leia reference. Well spotted.**_

* * *

Chapter 8: I… Something... You...

Stunned into silence by Helga's convenient appearance outside the store, Arnold paused to catch his breath. The ambient sounds of nighttime traffic hummed all around them from across the city, yet everything remained more quiet than usual in the parking lot of Big Bob's Beepers. Helga had been the entire reason Arnold jumped out of bed and ran across the city; the moment his concern for her spurred him on to get himself here as fast as humanly possible, and possibly then some as he now found himself completely winded.

With the time currently sitting somewhere after midnight or later; Arnold hadn't had time to check the time, and it occurred to him on his way over that he didn't exactly have a plan to reach Helga once he reached the Pataki residence. Even Big Bob hadn't gotten desperate enough to try keeping his business open twenty four hours a day, and that was going to be an obstacle. Sure, Helga had broken into Arnold's house more than once… but it just felt less than okay even in his own mind for him to try the same strategy. Someone in their relationship had to respect some semblance of boundaries.

And yet once again in its unfathomable but predictable way the universe had just thrown Helga in his path, and conveniently before he even had a chance to run into her and knock them both to the ground, as was their usual unplanned custom.

The two preteens just stared at one another quietly as Arnold stewed things over in his mind. He felt his heart pumping from his mad dash to Big Bob's Beepers, and he now felt it stronger than before as he beheld Helga standing in the moonlight. It had taken him ten or so years, but he really did see Helga in a wholly different light than he had in past.

It had been a complicated day in an already complicated life for both of them, and neither one of them really knew what to say to one another. Arnold had just had a long weird odyssey of a dream that he felt had told him something, and condensing it all into something Helga would understand presented another challenge.

Naturally Helga broke the silence first.

"Arnold?" she asked tentatively, not even bothering to cover her surprised reaction with her usual anger.

"Uh… uh huh…" Arnold panted.

"You uh… wanna go first, or should I?" Helga asked sheepishly.

"I'll… go first…" Arnold wheezed, "I… was thinking a lot… about the… stuff we..."

"Never mind, you're out of breath." Helga shushed him, "I'll go first."

With her jaw hanging open, Helga stood there as if waiting for the words to pour out with ease, but her consulate talent as a wordsmith came up completely short. Now the two kids just smiled awkwardly as they looked away from one another, and then slowly their eyes wandered back and met again. Arnold had never had trouble looking anyone in the eye, not even Helga, at least until last summer. Now whenever he looked at her a multitude of emotions always boiled to the surface, and they typically manifested as deep unfulfilled longing… or deep burning rage. Or worse occasionally he felt a mixture of both feelings at once which just added up to a mess.

Strange. This must have been how Helga had felt for most of their lives… and now he was finally starting to get it. That realization brought a small smile to Arnold's face, but then he noticed Helga making an odd face.

"Funny little weekend, huh?" Helga asked.

"That's putting it lightly." Arnold said.

"So, am I… still dreaming?" Helga asked searchingly

"I don't think so." Arnold shrugged, "This all seems pretty real compared to all that melted cheese and- wait… I thought I was the one having the dream?"

"No." Helga shook her head, "No that was definitely me… flying through time and space until I ended up in the climax of some eighties adventure movie and-"

"But I was flying too." Arnold said, "Well, sort of walking through air… and then you saved me from all these girls made of molten cheese and-"

"No way, I'm the one who was dreaming about you!" Helga insisted, "I finally got to be the chosen one! Don't take that away from me, bucko!"

"No," Arnold continually argued against her, "I had a whole revelation and everything about… about…"

"Listen Arnoldo, you're just gonna have to cop to me being right about-"

"Helga?" Arnold cut her off.

"What?" Helga asked.

"I… think it's possible for more than one of us to dream." he said, "I think we might both have had dreams…"

"Oh right, that'd be convenient. Like we'd both be dreaming about… each other… at the same time?" Helga asked with her voice slipping out of angry and into her soppy romantic tone, "Oh Arnold… they say we dream of the ones we love… even when it's the stuff of nightmares. Ooooh…" she swooned.

Arnold shrugged.

"And now those very dreams have brought us back together where we belong…" Helga cooed amorously, but then suddenly she frowned, "Wait… what were you gonna do if I wasn't already out here in the parking lot? Were you gonna break into my room or something?" she asked, then added, "Creep."

Arnold frowned, unable to tell if she was being ironic or not.

"Pot calling the kettle black?" he said.

"Psh, it's cute when I do it." Helga teased, but then her face sank again, "But what are you doing here in the middle of the night, football head? Shouldn't you be more worried about your uh... parents?"

"I thought so…" Arnold said, "But for some reason all I could think about was you. I just I had to make sure you were okay. After the way we left things I just had to-"

"Follow your heart?" Helga asked eagerly, "And your heart guided you to this dingy run down old derelict place? Oh Arnold… even at my absolute worst still you're drawn to me like a fly to the sweet scent of a venus fly trap's maw… that was possibly the most unromantic thing I've ever said and I apologize…"

Helga grinned sheepishly as Arnold twiddled his thumbs, unsure of what to say next. As he mulled over all that he thought he'd learned from his dream however, he tried to sum it up to her in some reassuring light.

"Helga? It wasn't fair of me to want exactly what my parents have together… they set a pretty high bar and… well, we're just kids at the end of the day." Arnold said, "I mean, every relationship is different. And it's okay if we don't always get along perfectly, or even if we fight sometimes. I think I get that now. One fight doesn't change the way I feel about you."

His words sounded rambling even to himself, but Helga seemed to get the gist of what he was trying to express to her, judging by her rather squishy body language. It occurred to Arnold that he often had a hard time reading body language… heck, he didn't even really realize that was even a thing but somehow it came through loud and clear with Helga now.

"You mean…" Helga asked, in a somewhat leading tone.

"Yes." Arnold nodded.

"You mean you…?" Helga asked with her fists clenched in girlish glee.

"Yes." Arnold said again.

"You… can say those… three little words...?"

"I get it." Arnold said.

"Ugh!" Helga groaned in bitter frustration, her tone intensifying, "After all this and still nothing?"

"No, not nothing!" Arnold insisted.

"Criminey! What the what, Arnoldo!? Why can't you just say those three little words?" Helga demanded.

"Because!" Arnold shouted with such intensity and indignation… for him at least, that it shut Helga up instantly. Her eyes went wide and she fell silent as Arnold took a deep breath and readied himself to try to put his problem into words. "Because I was so ready to say it before… a long time ago…"

Helga raised her eyebrow with interest.

"Hear me out." Arnold began, but then he took a long pause as he chose his words carefully, "I was ready to say it to Ruth."

Clearly he hand't chosen his words as carefully as he should have, as Helga grounded her teeth together as she appeared to be trying to set him on fire with the intensity of her glare.

"And Lila!" Arnold continued digging his own grave, knowing he had to get to the point before she struck him dead where he stood, "And Summer… and Mary Margaret…"

"Who the heck is Mary Margaret!?" Helga demanded.

"I barely even remember!" Arnold cried, "And that's the point! I really thought I felt things for all those girls! And I was wrong every single time! Back then I thought I really had something with each one of them, and now looking back every time it ended up being... nothing! They were just passing interests."

The fiery rage in Helga's eyes subsided slightly as Arnold's voice wobbled, sounding almost on the verge of tears. In all the time they had known one another Arnold had never been one to get emotional, and that seemed to pacify her as she gazed at him searchingly.

"Helga…" Arnold said carefully, "Have you ever… felt this way about anyone else?"

Helga blinked in slight surprise, but then she mulled his question over and shrugged.

"Does… Ronnie Matthews count?" she asked, .

"Huh?" Arnold almost gasped. He hadn't even heard the name of the pop sensation and former so called 'voice of a generation' since the fourth grade.

"Kidding." she snickered, somehow slowly regaining her sense of humor, "I uh… nope. Pretty much just you. Actually yeah. Entirely you..."

"Well, I've liked other girls before…" Arnold sighed, sounding almost ashamed at that, "I really thought I liked them liked them. I kept thinking I was ready to just tell them… you know, that I loved them. But with you now it's… different…"

Helga returned his words with a blank stare. Arnold sighed, not knowing if he was coming across coherently

"I… I don't know exactly what it is we have but it's different. It's so different than anything I ever felt with Ruth or Lila… what we have now it's… it's special. In a way I can't even describe. I want to tell you how I feel about you… but I'm afraid."

"Afraid? What have you got to be afraid of with m-" Helga smiled impishly, "Okay, apart from the obvious… clearly I'm at least a little bit terrifying."

"Yeah, but… I really like that about you. More than just like." Arnold said, which made Helga light up a little, "But like I said… I thought I felt that before about other girls and I… I can't say those three little words because I don't want what we have to turn out like it did with them! Because you're different! You're really special to me!"

"Again with the 'special.'" Helga sighed, "I mean seriously, Simmons has said that word so much it's lost all meaning to me."

"I mean it, Helga." Arnold insisted as he drew nearer to where she stood, "It's not even because I'm afraid of having my heart broken… I went through that before. Now I'm afraid of hurting you. I want to say it. I do… but I want to say it right. I want to say it the way you always say it to me with all that passion and honesty. You deserve to have me say it without a single shadow of a doubt. And if I rush saying it then… then it won't be what you deserve."

Helga's eyes bored into Arnold's. He'd spilled his guts and meant every word of it. He knew in his heart exactly how he felt about her, and he wanted to just say 'I love you' to her but some part of him still had reservations for fear of hurting her. Silently Helga appeared to interpret exactly what he felt towards her.

"Arnold?" she said with a deep inhale, "I think I… understand. Me. Understand. Something from you. That progress. Basic speaking skills… fleeting… oooh..."

"It's okay." Arnold said.

"The sun is rising…" Helga sighed contentedly.

"On us?" Arnold asked.

"No, literally." Helga noted.

Arnold looked around and realized the early morning light had begun to illuminate the world around them. Either it had been closer to dawn than he thought, or he and Helga had just passed a few hours talking in the dark.

"Have we been talking out here for hours?" Arnold asked.

"Doesn't feel like it with you…" Helga swooned. "Eternity isn't a long enough time to be with you, my poor bashful little love."

Arnold chuckled, and Helga did likewise. Tiny moments of sharing laughter together just managed to eclipse whatever other issues they had between them. Arnold reached a hand out towards Helga, and she grabbed it without hesitation.

"So… that was your whole dream revelation thing. Wanna hear mine?" Helga asked.

"Sure." Arnold nodded.

"I guess I thought after San Lorenzo that'd be it…" Helga cooed, "Just a happy ending I've been waiting for since I was three, but now I think… I think love is something you have to work at every day. You slog through all the low points to get to those fleeting high points and then… rinse and repeat. I thought being with you would just be eternal bliss and… that wasn't fair of me to expect that of you. You're not some kinda divine chosen one I built you up as. You're just… a boy. The best boy ever but still, just a boy."

Arnold felt a flash of warmth cross his cheeks. Helga's flattery sometimes bordered on obsessive… okay, yes it was obsessive but it really did make him feel like a million bucks.

"I don't even remember why I was so mad at you…" Arnold sighed contentedly.

"Because I got your parents to fight with each other…" Helga cooed.

Arnold's eyes went wide and his face sank like the Titanic.

"Oh right…" he muttered.

"Okay, my turn to spill my guts…" Helga said, "Arnold? I'm sorry I did that… but I really was trying to help in my own horrible, crazy unhelpful way! I had this whole long complicated theory that your parents were too perfect, and you wanted us to be perfect like them, and no one can be so I thought if they acted a little more like regular parents that bicker and argue all the time then you'd feel better having normal parents and… and… whoa nelly is it getting hot out here?"

Helga stood in a puddle of her own sweat, brought on by her own intensity of speech.

"I know…" Arnold sighed, "I just think you might've hit a nerve with them you didn't know was there."

"Right. Their whole choice to walk out on you." Helga sighed.

Arnold winced slightly.

"Do you always have to say things so bluntly?" he asked.

"Nope, I just choose to anyway. I mean… not walk out on you but sort of leave you… indefinitely… but it's definite now because they're back, right? And…" she suddenly struck a prideful pose, "And who do you owe that to?"

"You…" Arnold admitted.

It was true; he'd longed for his parents' return for his entire life, and he entirely owed that wish fulfillment to Helga. His parents being slightly damaged goods after their return from a ten year coma may have caused him to forget that now and then, but the moment he remembered that he saw Helga in an entirely different light.

"That's right…" Helga said.

"I mean, they're adults." Arnold said, "I'm sure they'll be okay… even if they've never fought before and now they have no idea how to handle one…"

"Yeah…" Helga said waveringly, "You uh, sure you're confident on that one? I think I may have opened pandora's box this time…"

"I mean, your plan was a little sick and twisted." Arnold said, "But… not because you are, but because I guess life is kind of sick and twisted sometimes. And sometimes that's what it calls for."

Helga fixed him with a rather devilish grin.

"You really have a way with words, Arnoldo." Helga snickered.

"That's why I usually leave the speeches to you." Arnold said admiringly, "You're more sophisticated with all that stuff. Usually. But… I'm sorry I told you off last night. I know you always mean well even when you make everything go wrong…"

Helga cocked her brow and smiled wryly.

Arnold looked at her carefully. He couldn't fathom why, but he trusted her and that she could somehow fix his family issues even after her first disastrous attempt.

"Then since you brought my family together..." Arnold grinned almost as impishly as Helga typically did.

"I'm gonna keep you together." Helga said as she grabbed Arnold by the wrist, "Arnold, as your self-appointed personal demon and guardian angel I consider it my sworn sacred duty to keep butting in on your family until you regain paradise lost!" she declared. "C'mon, back to the boarding house! We've got a marriage to save…"

Arnold tried to run alongside Helga, but with her longer legs she ended up more or less dragging him back towards the boarding house. The tween couple joined by hand ran, skipped and frolicked through the streets on their merry way back to the Sunset Arms; a place undesirable to most and yet a place Arnold knew Helga had always secretly wished she could call home. As the sun rose over Hillwood they could feel a new beginning for them both.

"Oh Arnold, I feel everything renewed between us… I burned our love to the ground like a raging wildfire, and from the ashes anew rises our love, eternally reborn after every vicious cycle." Helga fawned, "Now, let's hope your folks can follow our example for once…"

"Yeah…" Arnold sighed happily as Helga's passion warmed his heart, but then another realization abruptly dropped on him.

"Helga… I just realized we're both still wearing pajamas…" he noted.

"Huh." Helga looked herself over and realized she was indeed still in her full body pink pajamas, "Well, if it took us this long to notice maybe your parents won' notice either. I mean, you come from a whole family of football heads and all."

Arnold grinned as he turned pink as Helga's ensemble. Suddenly the front door flew open and there stood Arnold's grandpa, similarly still dressed for bed.

"What the heck are you kids doing outside in your pajamas?" he asked.

"So much for that." Helga muttered, "These? These are costumes. Yeah, we're just getting back from uh… rehearsal… for the school play. It went really late."

Grandpa just looked at her blankly.

"Don't make excuses, short gal." Grandpa said, "You seem to have me confused for some old stick in the mud overly concerned with declining societal morals. If that's the kind of fashion statement that's hip with the kids today, then I just say go with the flow."

"Come on…" Arnold took Helga by the hand and led her inside past Grandpa.

They didn't have to search long and found his parents sitting across from one another at the breakfast table. Neither one of them betrayed any emotion as the kids stared at them.

"Mom? Dad?" Arnold asked carefully.

"Hey Arnold." the both said together, without their usual semi-robotic sunniness.

Arnold felt a touch of concern yet again rising in him.

"You guys… wonder where I've been?" Arnold asked.

"Oh no, we're trying not to be helicopter parents and all." Stella shook her head, "Trying…"

"Oh." Arnold said, "Well, great."

Tension hung heavy in the air. Arnold felt a great discomfort as he looked at his mom and dad's blank faces.

"Is something… wrong?" Arnold asked carefully. "You guys aren't still mad at each other, are you?"

"Well, Arnold…" Stella sighed.

"We want to be completely transparent." Miles chimed in, "Your mother and I have talked everything over and we've come to an agreement…"

"That… being…?" Helga asked in concern.

Miles looked at Stella and then back to the kids. After a long deep breath, he said, "Well Arnold, your mother and I talked it over and we think it's for the best. It's time for our marriage, such as it is... to end…"

* * *

_**DUN DUN DUN.**_

_**A/N**_

_**Thank you EnvytheSkunk for giving me the inspiration for this chapter months upon months ago. XD And to Anonymous Latino for that line about life being sick and twisted which I grabbed straight from your review a few chapters back. **_

_**Mary Margaret (Arnold's sixth grade crush from the book 'Arnold's E-Files') didn't make it into the dream two chapters ago, but I figured she'd work as a gag here since he barely even remembers her.**_

_**I don't know why I went with the cliffhanger, you all know it's not gonna happen but… favorite and review anyway! Or Miles and Stella will get divorced…**_


	9. Together Apart

_**HOLY CRIMINEY ANOTHER CHAPTER!?**_

_**Reviewer Responses:**_

_**Kryten: Wha? How did you guess? Oh… I think I'm realizing my primary weakness as a writer: revealing exactly what's going to happen in every story I write before I write it… damn my impatience. I think I do that for fear that I'll never actually finish or get to certain stories. XD Hope it was an enjoyable read regardless. **_

_**The JAM aka Numbuh i: Thanks! Heheh, I actually considered going with that angle but…. well, just read on.**_

_**Anonymous Latino: Yep. Show don't tell. That rule of writing I've struggled with forever so finally I figured why not make it a theme of this whole story. A bit of an on the nose meta message, but in the hands of a character like Helga who is herself a writer I think it works. I was planning on having him actually break in to the store and wake her up but then… no… as Helga says it's cute when she does stuff like that… somehow when the boy does it, well it gets a little… Twilight. **_

_**Yeah. I used to argue Helga was the real protagonist of the series over Arnold because he had no real arc… but now I'd say they're both the protagonists since Arnold's arc was learning what love really was through his other crushes on girls. They all ended in bitter disappointment, but those were moments of growth for him. With Ruth he learned not to judge by appearance, in Lila's case he kinda just made every wrong move possible from being too pushy to just failing to see their lack of chemistry, and then Helga finally taught him what true love really was by her example of selflessly putting his needs before her own. **_

_**Yeah… I had that cliffhanger in mind from the start even knowing full well it wouldn't fool anyone but… well, maybe I'll fool new readers. **_

_**Heheh, yeah Mary Margaret was basically just a retread of Ruth in one of the books, except she was even more stuck up, overtly mean and oblivious to his existence. **_

_**Veganmama: Yeah. In one of the early episodes where Arnold first realized he had a secret admirer he described it as obsessive but flattering. I've got a visual enough imagination to picture all this happening in animation… hopefully I described it so readers can too! Heh… thank you. Oh, and actually on that note about seeing this stuff visually I've got an annoucement after the chapter, stay tuned…**_

_**EnvytheSkunk: I agree. It's about darn time! ;) Thank you! I more or less thought up that whole ghost of crushes past dream Arnold had the moment I read that comment of yours months and months ago, and I've been sitting on it till now. **_

_**Hmm. I never thought of that connection with Mary and Gino. It would be kinda funny if they turned out to be related and she outed his whole Italian gangster facade as just being an act… and treated him like just an annoying little brother. Heheh, keep saying things… you tend to inspire ideas.**_

_**HAFanForever: Heh, yeah… I thought I'd have an easier time writing with greater frequency under this quarantine… nope, I feel sapped. I hope the ending can live up to expectations (fingers crossed).**_

_**braygirl: Well thank you! I appreciate the kind words of encouragement. **_

_**A/N: Well everyone, time for honesty… I have an addiction problem. No not with alcohol (I have that under control slightly more than Miriam), but with freaking Animal Crossing New Horizons… it's been a major distraction. Oh, and also the process of moving. Moving sucks. Don't ever do it. Seriously, even if you live in the crappiest little town in the middle of f-ing nowhere, it's preferable to the process of moving. Even if you're moving somewhere amazing. Like… Milwaukee Wisconsin. Which is a decidedly average place to live.**_

_**Right. So…. anyone remember where we left off? Right. Once again I threw in too many plot threads and themes and now they're all coming to a head. Overwhelmed myself again. Drat. Enjoy.**_

* * *

Chapter 9: Together Apart

Not even Grandpa or Grandma had been present for the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs, and yet the surprise news from Miles felt equally devastating for everyone present to the point that they all felt as if they had been there for it. Deeply shaken, Arnold's face turned ashen and his jaw fell open. Words failed him. The same could not be said for Helga, for whom words never failed.

"I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorry!I'msorrI'm-mmphh!"

Helga's endless running of her mouth was interrupted by Stella who covered the girl's mouth and shot her husband a look.

"Miles?" she said, "You really could have worded that better…"

"What?" Arnold gasped.

"Calm down, kids." Stella reassured them, "It's not THAT… it's not what you think… despite what he just made it sound like. You sure have a way with words, dear…"

As Arnold continued shivering, Helga breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

"Huh…" she sighed in slight relief, "So that's where you get your total lack of a way of words from, Arnoldo…"

"I thought he was just pulling an April Fools joke…" Grandpa poked his head into the room, "Heh heh, you really are your father's son, Short Man."

Helga looked at Grandpa Phil, then to Miles, then to Arnold, causing her to shake her head in confusion and frustration.

"No on else is confused that he calls you both 'short man?'" she asked.

"Around here we're all short men, Short Gal." Grandpa said proudly, "Some more than others."

"I heard that, Gramps!" the voice of the diminutive Ernie Potts bellowed from he adjacent room.

"Short Gal?" Helga snickered, "So, what's that? Your way of welcoming me into the fold?"

"Well it was inevitable." Grandpa said, "You've been chasing my grandson since you two were knee high to-"

"Can someone just explain what the heck is going on?!" Arnold shouted in an uncharacteristically boisterous and agitated display.

"Right, right. Sorry, Arnold." Stella wrapped her arms around her son and kissed him on the forehead. "Phil? Mind if we talk to the kids alone for a minute?"

"Hey, anything you have to say to Arnold… I've probably said to him before. And it'll probably just bore me into an early grave… I'll just be going then." Grandpa said understandingly, as he cleared the room.

Arnold and Helga turned their attention to Miles and Stella.

"Right then, if you three need a heart to heart I'll just be on my-" Helga started to say as she turned to leave.

"And we especially want you to be a part of this too, Helga." Stella said.

Helga froze in her tacks and spun around.

"Hey, c'mon! I'm not your kid. I'm not part of the family yet-" Helga caught herself, "Yet… and yet here you are trying to lecture me or ground me or whatever… like I was part of the fam here. Is this about all my meddling? I'm sorry, I'm a meddler. It's my way…." she laughed awkwardly as Arnold just looked at her in mild confusion.

"Nothing like that, Helga." Stella reassured her, "But in light of everything going on you should hear this too."

Helga shrugged and took a seat next to Arnold who sat literally on the edge of his seat with anticipation.

"Well, after what happened last night your mother and I thought we needed to have a serious talk…" Miles trailed off and looked upward.

Everyone else in the room just stared back at him blankly as he continued to stare upward in silence.

"Miles?" Stella asked, "Flashbacks don't work like that in real life, Miles. We talked about this."

"Oh, right." Miles snapped out of his trans, "Well anyway, Arnold? Your mother and I kind of got into it yesterday about…"

Miles swallowed as if trying to choke down something deeply unappetizing.

"Why we left." Stella finished for him, "All those years ago…"

"Yeah…" Helga said nervously, "Again, I feel really bad about-"

"It's okay, Helga." Stella reassured her, "We know you always mean well… in your unique way."

Helga smiled awkwardly.

"Heh… that might be putting it generously…" she muttered.

"So… after last night your mother and I realized that up until now we really hadn't ever fought before. Not really. Minor disagreements, but we'd always been united. A perfect team. We always felt everything we've ever done we did with the best intentions but we realize there's always going to be a lingering doubt about the biggest mistake we ever made… and worst of all we can't even call it a mistake. There were lives in our hands and we had to do something, but we ended up sacrificing the most important thing to us…"

"Your childhood…" Stella said to Arnold.

"It was the hardest choice we ever had to make." Miles said.

"And I always thought there was no choice at all…" Stella sighed, "But that doesn't matter. We know now whether we chose to leave or not… it happened."

"And we can't change what happened." Miles said, "We can only change what happens going forward. We wanted to reclaim what we lost with you, son."

"But we've had to accept it… we can't do that either." Stella said, "Those years are just gone. You're not our little baby boy any more, and we'll never get to see you grow up like we wanted." Stella's face turned deathly serious and determined, "But we've still got the rest of your life. I can't keep treating you like my little baby boy."

"Yeah that'd be good, kinda weird…" Helga said quietly.

"We're going to make an effort to be there for you without smothering you, Arnold." Miles said, "Give you some kind of normal family."

"Arnold?" Stella said, "We know you want some kind of normal family after all these years of having it… different. Miles and I have always felt a certain connection to a larger more… global family. You know, all the people in Central America we used to help, and especially the Green-Eyed people in some weird way were the only family we had for a long time, out in the rainforest. Just a big, unseen, non-traditional family. And with all the time we spent sending messages back and forth between each other, saving one another… that was our family dynamic. And then when you arrived it all changed. Here we were, back in the city trying to live like normal people."

Noting the look of concern on her son's face Stella tried to smile reassuringly, "Not that we didn't want to, of course. We just didn't know what we were doing. I felt responsible for the lives of hundreds of people I'd never even met, and they still somehow felt like family… and then I became an actual mother and being responsible for the life of one tiny human up close and personal and it was different. But we were going to give you the world… and we still screwed up."

"I know why you left." Arnold said, "I understand that-"

"No, she means when you almost fell off the slide and killed yourself." Miles said, causing Arnold and Helga to cringe, "We'd never been so scared in our lives… if that little girl on the swing hadn't pointed to you just in time I don't know what would have happened… but after that we made a promise."

"We vowed never to let you out of our sight again." Stella said, "Seemed like a realistic promise we could keep."

"Mom…" Arnold said, "You can't blame yourself for that. You couldn't just give me all your attention forever."

"Seriously," Helga said, "I'd have been content with five minutes a day from Bob and Miriam, tops."

Miles and Stella smiled at the two kids sitting before them. No one knew exactly how to resolve family issues this complicated with years of lost time between them. They all wanted to try at least, and that meant more than any squabbles they'd had over the past few days.

"Mom? Dad?" Arnold said, "I know… I know this is never going to be perfect, but I'm still glad you're here and… and I'm glad you chose to help the Green-Eyes, too. I mean… I'm not glad that you were gone but… I think it all happened for a reason. We all came together in the end and…" Arnold looked at Helga, "And it even brought us together."

Helga turned as pink as the bow on her head and she shrank into her seat.

"Why do you people keep bringing me into this?" she muttered, but then as Arnold took her hand in his she practically melted. Miles and Stella similarly linked hands and smiled warmly at the tween couple.

Stella said, "Arnold? We don't want to smother you of course, but-"

"Family hug! Right now!" Arnold said joyously as he ran towards his parents, "Grandma! Grandpa! You too!"

"About time!" his grandmother cackled as she appeared from behind the corner holding a tin can she'd been listening in on them with. Grandpa too followed behind them and the five Shortmans gathered together as a united family. Helga sat on the opposite side of the table looking on awkwardly.

"Well, if you're all gonna… then I'll just…"

"Oh, get in here Eleanor." Grandpa abruptly grabbed Helga by the wrist and pulled her into the group hug.

Helga resisted feebly at first, but then just let herself be part of the group. She really did feel more at home here than she ever had with her own family, even at their rare warmest and fuzziest of moments. For whatever unique challenges the family Shortman faced, Helga could see how lucky each of them was and how grateful they felt for one another. Despite her best efforts to resist, she felt touched by the copious sentiment all around her. Still, Helga could only stomach so much warm affection and shook her head as she broke free.

"So…" Helga cleared her throat, "What was all that about it being 'time for your marriage to end?' That seemed pointlessly ominous…"

"Oh right. Well, we know the past few months have been rocky, so I thought maybe we just needed a fresh start." "Stella announced, "And that's why now we've agreed we_ should_ split up."

"Gah!" Arnold panicked again and fell over backwards.

"What!?" Helga screeched, "You said you weren't-"

"Hold on a minute…" Grandpa said.

"Now who's got a way with words?" Miles asked, "She means we're just going to split up so we can start over fresh by getting _remarried!_"

Arnold and Helga paused for a moment to collect themselves. Their eyes darted back and forth towards one another and Arnold's parents, who said grinning inanely. Grandpa and Grandma looked at their son through half-lidid eyes and neither one dignified the idea with a snarky retort.

"You'd… go to all the trouble of splitting up… as in _divorced_, let's stop being afraid to say the word, just so you can immediately remarry?" Helga asked.

"Well, maybe not immediately…" Stella mused, "It's been years since I was a free spirit off on my-"

She stopped as she saw Arnold and Miles looking at her with their jaws agape.

"Kidding, kidding…" Stella giggled, "Seriously, neither of you know how to take a little joke."

"Tell me about it." Helga laughed, "But… seriously? Why not just… I dunno, renew your vows or something?"

"The vow no never let Arnold out of our sight agai-"

"Your wedding vows! Criminey!" Helga howled.

"Oh right." Stella said, "I… suppose that would be easier…"

"Not to mention cheaper." Grandpa said sternly, "I'm not paying for another wedding…"

"You didn't pay for the first one." Miles said.

"Oh, split hairs why don't ya?" Grandpa said in a faux angry voice. "Kids these days, having to marry more than once just to let it sink in."

"Renewing our vows…" Miles mulled the idea over, "Yeah, that might just be the ticket. A way for us all to start over fresh and begin again. Plus our anniversary is coming up… I think… you said we were on our steel anniversary right?"

"Yeah," Stella said somewhat sheepishly, "I uh… just can't remember the date…"

"Hey, he's the man!" Grandpa chided, "It's his job to forget anniversary dates! Unless you're married to Pookie like I am… then it falls to me. Every time our anniversary rolls around she thinks it's Guy Fawkes Day. I always have to hide the matches…"

"Well, gender roles aside I think if we're going to do another ceremony then Arnold should be the best man…" Stella said.

Arnold blinked in surprise, but then smiled at the notion. Stella then turned to her son's girlfriend, "And I was going to ask Helga to be my maid of honor. I thought that'd be cute."

"Maid of honor- oh, another one of those deals where we walk up the aisle together…" Helga groaned, "We already did that for Coach and Tish…"

"Well yeah, so we're pros at it now." Arnold laughed, "Besides… we have nothing to hide anymore, right?'

"And you're like family to us, Helga." Stella said warmly.

"Uh huh. Arnold, best man to his father and me maid of honor to his mother…" Helga said drolly, "Arnold? I'm going back home. Bob and Miriam are horrible but at least they make sense to me…" She then turned to leave and walked away very slowly.

"Helga…" Arnold said knowingly, "Come on, what's the worst that could happen?"

Helga looked upward and abruptly daydreamed a scenario.

_There she stood, adorned in a dress she had tailor made for the occasion, standing before Arnold looking like a polished statue of a football-headed Adonis. They both gazed longingly into one another's eyes. All around them their friends and family looked on in adoration at the happy couple. As the moonlight cast a pale light over them in the dark night Helga felt a rush of excitement the like she would only otherwise get from scoring tickets to Slam Jam 8. No, this kind of euphoria topped even that sublime feeling._

_"Darling I love you…" Helga said, "More than all the fish in the sky or stars in the sea do I love you."_

_"Yes." Arnold said, "And there's something I need to tell you…"_

_"Yes dear?"_

_"I think we should just be friends."_

Back in reality Helga's piercing screech sent everyone into shock. They all stared as she stood screaming at the top of her lungs endlessly until Arnold shook her out of whatever waking nightmare she'd just put herself into.

"What? Did the wedding get attacked by terrorists or something?" Grandpa asked, "You'd think so by the way you're screaming bloody murder…"

"Sorry…" Helga wheezed, "I do that sometimes… okay… worst case scenario."

Helga looked at Arnold who had his hands on her shoulders and was looking at her in concern and bafflement. This caring look in his eye earned a smile back from her as she sighed contentedly.

"Nah, that'd never happen… or at least it better not… alright, alright fine I'll be your stinking maid of honor!" Helga relented, "Criminey what is it with you guys always needing something from me? Helga be our maid of honor… Helga save us from the sleeping sickness… Helga save Christma- I mean… um… something else!"

The room laughed together at Helga's grumbling, which just brought an even bigger scowl out of the surly girl.

"Why do people keep laughing when I say crabby things now?" she huffed.

"Because we know it's a cover and it's cute…" Arnold said.

"Fine whatever," Helga said, "All right losers listen up. I caused this whole stinking mess in the first place, so it falls to me to clean it up. If we're gonna do this then we're gonna do it right. We're gonna make this whole stinking ceremony a spectacle so obnoxiously perfect it'll make you all puke…"

The others looked at Helga in silent shock.

"That's a good thing coming from her, " Arnold reassured them, "Just means she's passionate."

"Enough sassing, what's our budget look like?" Helga asked, now taking charge.

"Uhh…" Miles shrugged.

"Arnold? Don't be like your dad. If you go into medicine make sure you specialize in 'diseases of the rich.'" Helga instructed, "Now, we'll need someone who knows what they're doing in the even planning department. Someone who can do weddings for cheap…"

"Don't worry, you've got the cheapest wedding planner in town, right here!" a familiar voice came.

The others turned and saw another resident of the boarding house grinning broadly at them.

"Oskar?" Arnold asked, "When did you become a wedding planner?"

"About a minute and a half ago." he answered as he pulled out a pad of paper, "My rates are reasonable, and since you're all like family to me… how about just five grand for the whole package?"

"Do you take installments?" Miles asked.

"Miles…" Stella elbowed him in the abdomen and shook her head, "I think we'll pass on that, Oskar."

"Oh." "Oskar said somberly, "Well then can I just have five grand? Not for myself of course…"

Ignoring him, Helga continued, "Guess we'll need an officiant too… what are you guys practicing?"

"Uh…" Miles and Stella looked at one another, "We haven't really been practicing anything since we got back. We've been too distracted-"

"Great, you won't be picky then." Helga said.

"Well perfect. I'll take care of it then." Grandma chimed in, "I got ordained at one of those quicky online churches just yesterday!"

"What… church…?" Miles asked his mother in concern.

"What church? Oh, why it was called… the uh, something along the lines of 'Naughty Convent of Love' or something… oh I just can't remember. I must say though, those nun habits these days are much more revealing than they were back in-"

"I don't think that site was a church, Pookie…" Grandpa coughed.

Arnold suddenly found a pair of hands covering his ears. He looked up and saw his mother humming loudly as she attempted to keep him from hearing something.

"Ah whatever," Helga said, "That works. Arnoldo? You just help her get online and get ordained for real. Should take about fifteen minutes."

"Um, sure." Arnold said as he lightly batted away his mother's hands, not even sure what had brought on her action in the first place.

"Now then, I admit I'm not really all the knowledgable with event planning and I don't think-" Helga snaked her fingers, "That's it! I know who we can coerce into making a huge obnoxious spectacle… "

Arnold paused to wonder who that could be, before it occurred to him who she might be referring to.

"You don't mean Rhonda…?" Arnold asked.

"Rhonda?" Helga asked in amusement, "Hey, that's an even better idea! Good thinking, football head."

"Who were you planning on enlisting?" Arnold asked.

"Don't worry about it." Helga grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him out the door.

"Wait, kids?" Stella called after them, "You don't need to go to all the trouble of making this into a royal wedding!"

"I know but I want to!" Helga called back as she dashed out of the boarding house with Arnold in tow.

"And how do you plan to get Rhonda onboard?" Arnold asked with some reservation, "Appeal to her heart?"

"Nope," Helga said, "Her self importance. Come on Football head, we're gonna make this big fat football-headed wedding for the history books."

Arnold and Helga made their way across town to the lavish residence of the Wellington-Lloyds. To their amazement Rhonda actually answered the door herself, as opposed to the butler or other staff they had expected. Rhonda looked equally shocked to see the two of them at her doorstep, but she heard them out regardless.

"Let me get this straight." Rhonda tried to understand, "You want me to go to all the trouble of planning a wedding for Arnold's parents?"

"Yes, that's exactly what we just gone done saying…" Helga groaned, "We figured if anyone can pull a fancy shindig out of their hat in no time it'd be you."

"I mean, I was looking into branching out into event planning as part of my whole online persona…." Rhonda mused, "All right do you want to make an offer, or shall I just run the numbers to see what this is going to cost you."

"Don't bother, I've already got my counter offer ready for whatever six figure price you have in mind." Helga said.

"Only six?" Rhonda sputtered.

"Do it… pro bono?" Helga said.

"Pro- what?" Rhonda asked in confusion, "And what in urban talk does that translate to?"

"It's Latin…" Helga groaned, "It means will you do it for free? Huh?"

"FREE!?" a scandalized Rhonda spat, "My level of work? For free? Just handed out like cheese samples? That's an insult! A slap in the face!"

"No it's not, but here's an actual slap in the face so you can see the difference…" Helga raised her hand only for Arnold to grab her wrist and restrain her.

"Rhonda, hear us out," Arnold said, "We're not asking you for a favor just because we're friends… I mean, we are friends aren't we?"

Rhonda considered for a moment but then nodded.

"Well of course, I suppose," Rhonda affirmed, slightly begrudgingly.

"Yeah, yeah doesn't matter," Helga cut in, "You wouldn't be doing this for us anyway, you'd be doing it for you. And how could you not do something for you?"

"I do do things for me a lot, it's true…" Rhonda said rather pensively, "But still, you expect tome to just be able to whip up a presentable event in less time than it takes to say it?."

"Exactly," Helga grinned, "Think of the prestige that would come from such a challenge… think of everyone you'd impress with your level of taste and sophistication you'd bring to this whole event. You'd make a real name for yourself as more than just a shallow narcis- I mean nicesest girl in Hillwood. Just think, you wouldn't have to stalk us to get gossip, or have to keep posting about your own 'fabulous life,' you could build a whole brand on spreading fabulousness wherever you go."

Rhonda looked at Helga skeptically, but the damage had been done. Helga had successfully gotten the wheels turning in Rhonda's head and her mouth curled into a smile.

"Helga? You might be onto something… oh Arnold darling you're in luck. Yes, this might be just the platform I've been looking for… right , now let's get on securing a venue and planning out a theme… let's see, they went missing in the jungle so I'm thinking… outdoors indoors? Yes, something along those lines… oh! So many ideas just coming to me now! Let's see now…."

As Rhonda continued talking to herself, Helga nodded to Arnold affirming that their work was done. As the two of them stepped off from Rhonda's doorstep to go rally the others Arnold grinned at Helga.

"You know something Helga?" Arnold asked, "For once I have a really good feeling about one of your crazy plans."

"Thank me when it works, Hair Boy." Helga said. "Thank me when it works…"

* * *

_**A/N: Well we're almost to the end… sorry this took so long but I hope to have the story finished…. you know, before July.**_

_**MORE IMPORTANTLY**_

_**First off, forget my story. Wanna know the best thing about this quarantine? The HA! creator himself is basically doing his own fan fictions… except it's Craig himself so that basically makes it canon. If you don't already follow Craig Bartlett's instagram do check it out. We're basically getting a 'season 6' of sorts from him. He's been posting little vignettes about Arnold and Helga writing letters to each other during this quarantine, and it's every bit as precious as you'd imagine (he's even gone back to stills from old episodes and added little face masks to Arnold and Helga). **_

_**ALSO VERY EXCITING (for me anyway)… one of my stories got partially adapted into a flash animated youtube video! Check out the series The Anytown Show: Arnold's New Life Part 3 (watch parts 1 and 2 but it's part 3 that adapts my story 'Happily Never After'). The show combines basically every cartoon from the 90s into one universe, but it's pretty HA! heavy. Check it out!**_


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